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CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS AND THE CINEMA
the question 'Why is stealing forbidden?' Of the seventeen-yearolds, only 10 per cent gave similar answers. Another study by Macauley and Watkins shows that up to about nine or ten, children's moral conceptions are fairly rigid and expressed in terms of immediate personal relations. After about eleven, however, attempts at more generalised moral rules are made — 'from eleven years on, the children's ideas began to show an admixture of grown-up and conventionally recognised sins; but only in later adolescence do such "sins of the spirit" as hypocrisy and selfishness receive attention' (Murphy and Newcomb, op. cit., p. 677).
Interest in wider moral problems is illustrated beautifully by one of the girls who describes the film None Shall Escape, dealing with the trial of a Nazi war-criminal. She ends her essay by writing: 'The film . . . emphasises the leniency after the last war shown to the Germans, and the vital mistake made; also (the film) portrays in a vivid manner the innumerable crimes of the Nazis, and the danger in allowing even one of them to escape.' While a younger child might, at the time he saw the film, be impressed by the political propaganda implicit in this film, it is doubtful whether he would absorb it in the way this girl has done; she has obviously thought about the problem of the Nazis, judging by her method of discussing the film.
The tendency to make independent moral judgments is encouraged by the fact that, in our society, moral standards differ widely among different groups; contacts with new groups, and different moral standards, necessitate choice between them. The cinema can play an important part in widening the child's outlook, by portraying the differences of moral standards. However, 'the change . . . from external authority as the guide, to guidance from within is not absolute but largely in degree, and varies widely between individuals. It is possible for an adolescent who has not been trained to make his own decisions, who has been controlled completely by the adults with whom he is surrounded, to be still in the pre-school period in regard to the need for external control' (Arlitt, op. cit., p. 194). At the moment, the American and British film still portrays a decidedly traditional morality; for instance, in most gangster films the moral is that 'crime does not pay', but at least the causes for immoral behaviour are often shown, as in the Dead End Kids films. On the whole, however, it can by no means be said that the average film encourages the adolescent to make independent moral decisions; group and traditional morality is, on the whole, upheld. For instance, in This Happy Breed, one girl says
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