We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
THE ADULT AND THE CINEMA
people under twenty, e.g. my local coal boy, and I was never able to get more out of him than the admission T liked this film', or 'this was a pretty film'. Their or his reaction is difficult to assess except by very careful case study. It may well be that such a study would make the material collected here colourless and insignificant. But before we reach such a stage in the social investigation of film our academic psychologists will have to give up a considerable amount of their prejudices.
Naturally I have tested the problem whether our documents have such a representative character. I have talked to and interviewed in the course of about five months very many people: workers, employees, clerks, members of the professional classes, members of the aristocracy, middle class people, housewives, etc. I have kept notes of these interviews and only because they taught me the documents printed can be regarded as representative — though with some important qualifications about which I shall say more presently — have I decided to publish them as they stand.
Perhaps I should insert here an example of one of my interviews. Here it is:
Mrs. B. on Films
I interviewed to-day Mrs. B. about films. She lives in our street which is a typical North Paddington street (workers, employees, and a few lower middle class people make up our street's social colour). Mrs. B. is twenty-three, her husband is in the army; at present he is in Austria. Mrs. B. is attractive, nicely dressed. She lives with her parents and another sister who is a few years older.
Mrs. B. is frank with me. She probably believes I am a good married man and father and, in spite of my being an 'intellectual' who has written books and has thousands of them on the walls of his home, finds that I am at ease with workers. I have also fulfilled, to the street's satisfaction, my duties as a member of our local Civil Defence.
Mrs. B. is a war worker in a factory. She admits that films are the main topic of her and her colleagues' conversation. Of newspapers she reads only 'an interesting headline' and the gossip column. Mrs. B. also admits that she copies dresses and hair-do's from films. She is frankly envious of some of film stars' clothes and becomes at times — for this reason — dissatisfied with her home life. Her screen idol is Bette Davis or Greer Garson. She imitates the latter's hair style.
261