Sodom and Gomorrah : the story of Hollywood (1935)

SODOM AND GOMORRAH be only a phase of their lives, as those women possessed other qualities besides sexual lust And even though biographical films sometimes deai with notoriously immoral figures, they are less destructive than the common sort i)i lewd cinema, for they are hlms dealing with the 1:. of admittedly exceptional people. It is these "everyday" indecent pictures that have such an insidious relationship to our post-war immorality, especially since they are presented under the ban ner of being cross sections of average life. These films are advertised as "tin story of modern youth," etc.. whereas they are really the stories of abnormal, sordid, and pathological cases. An excellent example of this sort of thing is a recent Irene Dunne picture in which the heroine has to deal with an unscrupulous vamp and an adulterous husband. The advertising previews advised all women to see the picture because, "lure is a problem every woman may have to face." Now as a matter of fact it is a little absurd to declare that every woman may have to deal with such a >itua tion. as though it were inevitable like rainy weather. The vast majority of homes will never be troubled with the problems that arise in "This Man Is Mine." Here the ■'menace-' is a vamp who derives unnatural pleasure from watching a married man succumb to her wiles, and the subsequent anguish of the wife. So abnormal is the whole emotional situation that Dr. Freud would