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ACTUALITIES 163
speech. He never reaches knowledge that comes from an informed study of facts.
The Society in which that man lives, which moulds him to this pattern, is in turn moulded by him. Like him it is based on opinion. Cruelties and oppressions which a strong tyrant would justify or remedy are explained by sophistry or lies. All debate in politics or economics is so mere (much?) opinion. Theories of reform are evolved out of air and argued with useless and ludicrous zeal."1
Substitute critic for " educated man " and how aptly the first paragraph of this quotation describes a predominating type of present-day critic and reviewer. There is no doubt that a great deal of the regression and growing decadence of Society, both in America and out of it, is thrown upon the screen. But the facts portrayed do not differ from those exhibited by the early spectacles. By a laborious process the disease that characterised the Roman and other historical orgies, is made to appear that which characterises the cabaret orgies of the fashionable spectacle to-day. The symptoms are identical in both. But by reclothing the types that manifest them, by giving them the air of interpreting and explaining the age in which they now exist, by unintentionally making them demonstrate by means of " stunts " some of the significant conclusions and facts of twentieth century scientific thought, the picture makers lead us to believe that we are watching present-day men and society in a present-day environment. But human beings seen in the American picture are not changed according to the actual change now sweeping over the whole world. They are at bottom primitives. Douglas Fairbanks as Petruchio is simply Petruchio as Douglas Fairbanks; Tom Mix, the splendid cowboy, is merely the primitive hunter astride a noble steed and armed with a never failing deadly lasso. The study placed before us by the American Film Kings (if it may be called a study) is evolution, the kind of evolution that argues that actu
1 Geoffrey Davis, in " The Sociological Review," January, 1930.