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THE CONTENT OF FILMS have been administered by the films of Mae West who actually burlesqued the vamp type, to the delight of the public which had in all probability been entranced a decade earlier by what they now saw ridiculed.
As one would expect, simultaneously with the decline of the vamp occurred the eclipse of the romantic heroes, usually of Latin origin, of whom Rudolph Valentino was the prototype. Mystery and intensity ceased to be the characteristic qualities of the male film star, and a more typically American and 'manly' type of hero began to dominate the screen. But while 'sin', of the exotic variety beloved by the late romantics some decades earlier, was losing its belated popularity with the cinema public, there was a marked increase in the exploitation of brutality as a major motion picture theme. This tendency is clearly shown in the appearance of the gangster film, which became one of the principal types of film during the middle 30's, but which was less frequent in the years immediately preceding the war, and is now, in 1945, an almost extinct species.
During the war a high proportion of the film output has, as was natural, been devoted to war themes, many of which involved similar emotions to those excited by the old gangster, which suggests a possible explanation for the shelving of the latter. But if we exclude essentially topical films, by far the most common type would appear to be now the Technicolour musical. We have no statistical backing for this view, but it is evident that producing companies bestow their most frantic publicity on this type of picture, and it is the stars who feature in them that seem to epitomise the film world for the public of to-day, just as the stars of the vamp films and of the gangster films were household words in other years.
What emerges from this very brief survey of recent cinema history is that the proportion of any particular type of film to the total output is continually changing. Now, in Mr. Dale's book the bulk of the information and conclusions are based on the structure which prevailed in the period 1920 to 1931, and it is accordingly impossible to apply his findings to the present-day scene. The most valuable part of his study for us is, in our opinion, the technique of research which he evolved and which he describes in great detail. This technique for isolating the content of motion pictures is as valid to-day as when the book was first published, and might be used with very important results on the films of our own decade.
For it seems to us that only by a sociological and normative analysis of film will it be possible to raise the standards of film
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