Motion Picture Herald (Mar-Apr 1945)

BY TERRY RAMSAYE f^ytACK cloth and ashes. Hair shirts and hempen % girdles. All flesh is grass; all is vanity. It is i ^ the time of curfew. It is a time of mourning. Men die in battle. They fight for a cause, the cause of a nation which above all others has had the good life. It shall be the good life no longer. There shall be no gaiety for the girls they left behind them, nor for their fathers and mothers, nor for their sisters and brothers at home. It is the time of the great curse and all shall repent at home in the dark. <J That is decided, not by individual or national conscience but because of the special custodianship of it by Mr. James Byrnes, who ordains that America shall go to bed at midnight. The pretext is that it is to conserve coal and light. No one believes that, really. By the time the boilers cool from the shutdown it is time to start up again. All Washington was saying it was a gesture the day it started — and the rest of the nation is saying so, now. No facts and figures, with which the bureaucrats are so commonly eloquent, are coming now. America of those metropolitan centers which have emerged from the "horse and buggy days", the days of the dim lanthorn and the watchman of the night, considers that it is getting a kicking around for the sake of a kicking around. Are we being taught to obey — and, if so, obey who? Many in this America believe that they are being softened up for more dictatorialism to come. So many orders — ranging from the length of shirttails to what of flesh or fish or fowl one may eat on this day or that, whether cuffs on the trousers or not, or if brassieres may have elastic or drawstrings — are coming from so many places that it is hardly now to be asked if all or any such orders have any real authority. For awhile yet, one may suppose the people will in a lip-service sort of fashion agree to be bossed, while they go out and make other arrangements— black markets for panties, speakeasies for a highball at 1:00 A.M. The madness of it is manifest, just as it was in the days of prohibition. Decency departed and Capone came in, empowered, distressingly enough, as the lawless servant of thwarted human rights. The hodden grey of the Roundheads falls upon Broadway, and the lights go out on this street of the world. But, within the week, come tidings that the British Ambassador is to go with a party to Oklahoma to ride to the hounds, in pursuit of wolves, in lieu of the classic fox, and thence to a tour of the Southwest. Does he in all that gaiety, in this world at war, have Mr. Byrnes' approval? And will the Viscount have to be abed by midnight? And what of Comrade Stalin who, like many New Yorkers, works at night? Mid-afternoon is the morning in Moscow and the lights in the Russian halls of state burn until the dawn. It has been the international boast that through the small hours there are banquets — and so many as forty toasts in vodka. Considerably it is thought by some that the address is at the City of New York, in a fashion of building the hate of the country against the town. That is an ancient political device. Power can be builded of hate as readily as out of devotion. The firm, unimaginative Mr. Byrnes wouldn't know it, but the City of New York, for instance, is in much more special case even than the District of Columbia with its array of embassies and extra-territorial and international areas. <J New York is a state, and about now it might be having some state's rights. It is the state which, in truth, stands between the rest of the United States and the rest of the world. Perhaps it is not, precisely, America, but it is the cultural and economic threshold between the new world and the old — and Asia, too. It is the city where special arrangements are made. C[ It is the place where State Department entertainers bring the visiting potentates and scions of power and royalty to give them a good time under the protocoled cover of censorship. It is the place where a Queen of China can come shopping, where princes of the Orient may pick geegaws and cumshaw to take back to their harems. Mr. Byrnes is apparently controlled by the notion that going to bed with the chickens is a token of national virtue. That dates from the time when only highwaymen and harlots stayed up nights. Mr. Edison's electric light arranged to liberate the race from lantern and candle and gas. Unhappily, he made it possible also for men to work after sundown. But also the lamps let men live, independent of the sun cycle. They do, and they work as much in America's areas of peace as Mr. Byrnes' regions of war. For both, they work all hours. <fl Morals are not in the clock. Neither is patriotism a matter of meridians and chronometers, nor sunset nor dawn. Neither God nor Virtue have office hours. It was said with deep tragedy, rather awhile ago, that "lights are going out all over Europe". Now Mr. Byrnes is turning them off here. MOTION PICTURE HERALD, MARCH 17, 1945 IS