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THE CONTENT OF FILMS from 10 to 14 years — be taken in or become influenced by the cynical attitude towards married life? Our questions show that we entirely disagree with the Film Institute's verdict about the film.
In our film-diary we have written the following note about Blithe Spirit:
Here is a film which, from the point of view of acting, direction, and general technical achievement is superb, but whose implicit outlook is completely out of touch with the main currents of thought and feeling to-day.
It is not as if the film were genuinely escapist — then it would have to stand or fall by its success as pure entertainment: the fact is that in Blithe Spirit we are confronted with an expression of values which pervades every line of the dialogue and the treatment of every situation of the plot. These values are essentially negative; they involve an attitude to life which is brittle, egotistical, and thoroughly cynical. It is true that such a spirit was prevalent between the wars in certain sections of English society, and that to this extent the film does reflect reality. But what one deplores is the way in which the situation is accepted without criticism, without detachment, without irony, as though it were the desirable norm, for to-day as yesterday.
If the play could have been presented in the film as a kind of 'period piece', there would be no grounds for complaint, but the world which it portrays is, perhaps, too near us, in time if not in feeling, for the average person to be able to view it in this way.
One cannot, therefore, help wishing that so much brilliance in production had been devoted to a theme more worthy of the great days in which we live, and that Mr. Coward's sparkling trifle had been left for a time when it could be seen in perspective for what it is.
We do not seek a quarrel with the British Film Institute. On the contrary, we only intend to show that even the Institute, which has done so much to raise the standard of film appreciation, is so uncertain of the critical norms it applies.
The problem of the value patterns as implicit in films appears to recur again and again on these pages. Clearly this is only one problem of a sociology of film among very many others of similar urgency. (Not all of them are discussed in this book.) For example, take the art form of the cinema in relation to the theatre. It is true that we discussed {see particularly Chapters II and III) the cinema in relation to the Greek theatre and the Roman circus from the point of view that all three had and have a universal audience, but we did not ask the question to what extent and why is the modern
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