Juvenile delinquency (1955)

126 JUVENILE DELINQUENCY FBI men being armed. They weren't permitted to carry arms at the time. We showed the arming of FBI men and how they could pro- tect themselves and protect law and order, and whatnot. It all came to pass, which is now in existence. I feel that motion pictures have done a great job in that respect. We have really shown life in the raw, shown the cause, shown the effect and we show the cure. In fact, the New York Times dubbed this as combining good citizenship with good picturemaking. In fact, we have used that slogan quite often ever since. In fact, it is quite a good one. Not only in just this type of lilm, but I mean in pictures of every walk of life, probably a thousand or more, in that number. Chairman Kefauaer. Pictures certainly have a great impact on the kind of citizens, good or bad, that we are going to have. Mr. Warner. Yes. Another thing I felt, m addition to the pro- hibition debacle, which I believe apparently it turned out, so far as I am concerned, was the world wars that we have, both the hot and cold, over the period of about 32, 33, 34 or 35 years. That, too, has seen what I would say were life and human rights, where they were at the lowest ebb. . I happened to have been in the war, at the end of the war, m Dachau. I saw the operation of that particular camp, and there was no human rights whatsoever. Naturally, we depicted films—when I came back I happened to make a picture called "Hit or Live" where I redepicted the things I am mentioning here. I won't go into a long dissertation on it. The world has, of course, been evolving around some very, very troublesome times. The matter, as I see it in the last 40 or 50 years of my life, has been that everybody—those years have been very, very tough years, and that had a lot to do with the planting of the seed of juvenile delinquency. After all, if vou are in a war or in peace, whatever it may be, you see law and order being disrespected, tossed aside, people getting off easy or getting oft' hard, whatever it may be, I think it has a lot to do witli creating the juvenile delinquency problem we are facing today. I feel committees of your kind, all American citizens who think right, can do a lot to eradicate and stamp out this; I know they can. Committees of your kind have done great jobs heretofore and I know you can do this^ one by the very idea of going around to citizens and bringing it to the attention of the people, the mothers and fathers and kids themselves realizing j ust what they are doing. Let's show them in pictures, if we can do good, or show it in every- thing that is printed, if it does good. It does do good. There has been a bad one here and there, which there is in everything. But on the whole you will find—I have very rarely ever seen a film that hasn't had some kind of a moral, either for good or bad, but they have some kind of a moral. I feel the prohibition, the years of the wars has planted all this. Kids are tough. I, too, was brought up in Youngs- town, Ohio. It wasn't an easy town. It was a mixture of all races and a pretty tough town; a steel town. I haven't been there in 30 years. I guess it is all right now, ^^^len we make these films we must have this dramatic content or you just can't malce a motion picture. You are not living in a tranquil world, Utopia, because it really doesn't exist. When you make a film