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ON THE NATURE OF CINEMA 55
metallic brilliance, full of dry cynicism, and a sceptical approach to things, is what you expect of a people on the point of realizing Mammon is not all. ^Americans are not afraid to laugh at themselves; the verb cto de-bunk5 is popular in the American vocabulary, as indeed it is fast becoming in the English. Not that the English appreciate true satire; they fancy a propensity for poking about after truth, but in looking for it take very good care not to upset their ingrained sense of decorum should it happen to reflect on
themselves. /
Films such as Twentieth Century\Blonde Bombshell, and the grimly ironical I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, are satirical comments on the age. It is as if producer and director had stepped up and said : 'Well, this is what you are, you folk; and, as you can see, you 're a pretty poor lot in our opinion.5 The modern high-tempo dialogue film is probably the finest instrument for satire that has ever existed. For the essence of good satire is topicality. What may have been intensely satirical to the^m de siecle, for instance, will not strike us as so devastating to-day. We are not of that period, and we can only appreciate a period's satirists in relation to their period, not to our own. There is little doubt, I think, Wyndham Lewis's stupendous novel, The Apes of God, will go down to posterity as one of the greatest pieces of satire ever written. But its satiric value will be judged historically; its pure value as art is in its manner.