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35Q INFLUENCE OF FILMS ON THE PUBLIC
only concession they make is to time their graveyard cum snakechillers to take place when Elmer and Alfred are supposed to be tucked in bed. That little Irwin and Ida may creep to the landing and stand shivering in their nightshirts hypnotised into a palsy of fear from which they cannot free themselves because of the fascination of the deep voice of gloom and the cracked tolling church bell which precedes these excursions into the macabre, excursions such as would make Edgar Allan Poe quake if he were alive to-day, is just nobody's business at all, let alone the busybodies. And that children are drawn from their beds by such programmes in thousands of working class homes I have no doubt at all, for an examination of a tiny cross section of families in a small English village has produced for me three such children in as many minutes of questioning.
There is no prohibition on children going to a music hall unaccompanied. There they may see a couple of dozen scantily dressed ladies and listen to the comedians pull gags so blue that the band often looks embarassed.
Does one need to raise a voice to-day, not in defence of the film but to point out that the film has brought a new way of life to millions of people ?
The Victorian and Edwardian home has given place to a streamlined ideal based on the work of the film art directors. The modern girl's make-up and hair style is more chic than her mother ever knew, thanks to the films. One can see the work of the film, too, in clothes styles. These things are superficial, but look below the surface and one finds a way of living, of tolerance, of breadth of mind for which the cinema can claim to be responsible.
There are those, of course, who would like to make the screen a propagandist medium and those who would like to condemn it to death because of the harm which it is supposed to bring to the rising younger generation.
Propaganda on the screen can be a two-edged sword. Remember those films that used to Iprove that the criminal must always pay the penalty in the end ? American welfare experts are said to have suggested their cessation because the young idea, so far from refraining from crime because of the moral lesson they taught, took to crime because the films showed exactly where the other chap made his ultimate blunder !
Nonsense, no doubt, and Dr. J. R. Rees, the British Army's chief psychiatrist, after examining thousands of men in the forces, gave