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CONCLUSIONS AND POSTULATES
we see are pernicious to our nervous system. They are a mere drug which undermines our health, physical and spiritual. 'No man5, wrote Francis Gentleman in the eighteenth century, 'can be hardy enough to deny, that a well-regulated drama is worthy support in the most polished, learned, or moral state.5 Yet, as the drama of his time appeared to him conducive to vice, his intention was 'to strip off the serpent's shining coat, and to show the poison which lurks within'.1 The same applies to the cinema to-day.
You may go to-day or to-morrow and see in any London suburb or in any town in England The Woman in the Window or The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry. In both films you see a murder case which is not supposed to have happened in reality, but about which the would-be murderer dreams. Naturally, with all the tricks of a make-believe reality. Have you ever dreamt of murdering somebody? If not, go and see these films, they will give you — pleasant dreams. Our social life is — without such films — full of problems of the most serious and urgent nature, social, and personal; why is it necessary that we create artificially nightmares and cruel psychological refinements? Where does this constant drugging lead us? It must naturally make us unfit to master our lives as they are.
This leads us to certain postulates which may be implicit in the preceding pages of this book, but which now perhaps need some further elucidation. Here, too, my views have considerably hardened since these studies were begun.
There is first the entire complex of films for children, with all its related problems. It would appear that in the light of the evidence submitted in this book the cinema clubs of the commercial film organisations will have to be terminated. Children's cinema clubs ought to be supervised by educational authorities and run under the authority of communal bodies.
Municipal authorities, e.g., those of Birmingham, Manchester, London, could easily build children's cinemas of their own and thus link the cinema of our young with other leisure activities. I am fully aware that such a suggestion may entail the danger of increasing bureaucratisation, but it seems to me that this danger may be more readily accepted than the present commercial practices to which the children are exposed.
Regional and communal children's cinemas would have the additional advantage of making the children familiar with local
1 Cf. A. C. Ward, Specimens of English Dramatic Criticism XVII-XX Centuries, Oxford 1945, from which the above quotation is taken.
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