Motion Picture Herald (Mar-Apr 1945)

MOTION PICTURE HERALD COLVIN BROWN, Publisher MARTIN QU1GLEY President and Editor-in-Chief TERRY RAMSAYE, Editor Vol. 159, No. 3 OP April 21, 1945 TOMORROW IS NOW A TIME of casting up has come. It is to be seen, in days ahead, if the passing of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a memento mori incident in the life of a great man in great days, or if it is also a tide mark in the evolution of the republic. Tomorrow is another day and it is here. For the motion picture there may be important concern. In the period of the Roosevelt administration there has been a driving pursuit of what he ROOSEVELT called objectives. It has deeply affected all industry through these years, and may for years to come. There has been a continuous trending toward an official state of mind that would make the motion picture a public utility. Part of this may have been a design, apparently manifest in the days of the NRA and the attentions of the Temporary National Economic Administration, to make the motion picture a demonstration field for a national policy. The preoccupations of the war may have delayed the process, legislatively, and may have accelerated it administratively. The screen has been told a lot about what to do since Pearl Harbor, and it has done it, with zeal and patriotic cheerfulness. The motion picture as an industry, as recorded by dollar figures, has, for the while, been doing well because it lives by the payroll dollar, from day to day. In terms of taxation, in a period of taxation extraordinary, ft has been fortunate in being able to pass to the ultimate consumer the special war levy upon amusement. The screen has enjoyed the position of being proclaimed a public necessity ■for morale, and for messages of the war cause, and of being concurrently treated with a luxury excise. It has enjoyed the interested approval of the Department of State as an element of international relations and trade promotion, and the interested regulative attention, from the National Recovery Administration to the Department of Justice, all the while. HOLLYWOOD and the screen have been praised for labours in the causes from the shows of pictures and people at the war fronts to the drives on war loans, Red Cross campaigns and endless causes at home, by the Department of the Treasury and by the Chief Executive. Concurrently the bureaus and planners of economy and the Department of Justice, too, have been vocal with criticism not only of the trade practices of the industry but of the whole of its production structure and inter-corporate relations. The other night on the air Mr. Raymond Moley, who was a member of the original Roosevelt "brain trust", remarked that "we are surrounded by big government, big business and big labour". Business is no bigger, but Government and Labour are vastly bigger, and the motion picture has been having experience aplenty with both. What comes now will perhaps tend for awhile to follow the inertia of the movement so long under way. President Harry S. Truman will be busy mostly with the big concerns of war and peace. It seems to be the general measure and forecast that he will be found a "little to the right of center" — that being inspired, of course, by Mr. Roosevelt's line about being "a little left of center". What President Truman thinks about the motion picture may be conjectured to be what may be the state of mind of a typical middle class citizen of Jackson County, Missouri. It is unlikely that to him the motion picture at this time will be a very special subject or special object of attention. The new President comes of those plain people of the great Mississippi basin of the midcontinent. They are counted big among the millions who cast their vote for the motion picture, as is, at the box office every day. In their service and by their patronage the screen has grown great. There is that about President Truman which indicates that he is not one to forget the yesterdays and not one to consider that progress can only be had by ignoring its foundation in what has been wrought before. It is to be hoped now the motion picture may be entrusted to the people, the customers who exert the final controls by their patronage, and to the organized industry with its processes of self-regulation, definite and broadly effective for the art. The screen can do with less of those pressures, direct and indirect, emanating from persons and groups engaged in political designs and economic theory. The exhibitors' experience with pictures of studied political import, of which there have been a few, is not calculated to encourage their production. It is the American Way to have and enjoy a free screen, along with a free press. President Roosevelt saw and affirmed and declared for that — despite patterns of some of his contemporaries and followers. It will perhaps be just as well if events support the forecast of Mr. Moley that in the new administration at hand "experts will be experts, but not law givers". — Terry Ramsay e The passing of President Roosevelt at this high moment in the tide of destiny is an abrupt and tragic fact to all the world. It is to be realized now that through his long administration the motion picture has become a factor of national and international expression of more import than through all the rest of its fifty years. He was aware of, more interested in the screen as a medium than any chief of state before him, or contemporary with him. He saw more pictures, and saw pictures more often, than any other President of the United States. It was by no coincidence that immediately upon his first election he chose for his secretariat two Washington representatives of the newsreel. It is to be recalled that he alone among world statesmen took special spoken cognizance of the service of the screen to the causes of the great war, that he alone among them made declaration for freedom of the screen in the face of world trends toward censorships under provocation of war. This industry can with pride now remember that it has these years been President Roosevelt's friend. Martin Quigley.