World Film and Television Progress (1937-1938)

AMERICAN SURVEY .» Vigorous films against social abuses" The greater concern of the American film with ordinary people and with the problems that arise in ordinary lives has been helped by the greater proneness of social relationships in the United States to explode into violence and by the more glaring unevennesses in the social structure. There are injustices and abuses in England, but they are neither so hideous nor so melodramatic as the "chain" gang and the third degree. Lynchings and murder, rackets and gun-play, are not the whole of life in the United States but they are a part of it, and it is long since the cinema first realised it. But there is a new tone apparent in the American pictures of social wrongs and of individual misfortunes. A New Orleans correspondent of the Era complains that "the reform complex has hit the studios like a disease . . . things have come to such a pass that it is difficult to find an evening's entertainment in town, something to make you forget your troubles instead of getting all steamed up over other people's!" Although film production in America is big business, strongly concentrated in the hands of the Rockefeller and the Morgan clans, this documentary streak in the American cinema has become a radical one, ansmically radical perhaps if compared with the American novel, but radical nevertheless, and strongly so, for an entertainment with such social inhibitions as the cinema. It is said that "Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" the theme song of Disney's Three Little Pigs, became the anti-depression anthem of the American people and that it did much to carry Roosevelt into office at the Presidential election before last, and it may be that the general popularity of Roosevelt and the New Deal is mainly responsible for such films as Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and for Paramount^ new film Make Way for To-Morrow, which is described as an "exposition of the need for social security." The films directed against various social abuses are more vigorous and brutal than these. Fury, Mountain Justice, We Who are About to Die, and other films have improved on the tradition of Ten Thousand Years in Sing Sing and / am a Fugitive from a C/iain-Gang, and Mr. James Cagney and Mr. Paul Muni are two actors whose own strongly held personal views are tending to confine their activities to this type of film. Winterset, which had no racket to expose and was not noticeably tied down to social theory, was based indirectly on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and probed far deeper into social injustice than English film makers apparently care to do. It is odd, incidentally, that all these films should be made in California, where Tom Mooney still languishes in gaol. Some American critics have deplored this tendentiousness in the modern American cinema, and find, in fact, tendentiousness in strange places, complaining that Mutiny on the Bounty and The Barretts of Wimpole Street are films against dictatorships, and that Lost Horizon is Communist in tone. Audiences too have objected, but it is likely that here territorial sensitiveness is responsible. But American audiences as a whole must be willing enough to pay for Gabriel Over the White House, Front Page, Black Legion, and I Promise to Pay, or the business men who control production would take to more lucrative subjects. It seems a pity that English films cannot deal so vigorously with vital subjects; such films must be "box-office propositions" in the United States, and the English film lacks both vitality and boxoffice appeal. — The Times BIG PILM DEAL REAL BRITISH PlTCMKJ Low's Comment on British Filmproduction courtesy of the Evening Standard) ChiarT$-(Cai-ShcN Pn'nce. fVbnolulu, Lfo folsToy, father Owine and fvlae West have been engaged 1b sTar In National Epic. "The book is by a dead gyy called Milton buT" HanK SpVtars putfinA -TriAht. Spike Hughes on America's George Gershwin To my mind the famous "Rhapsody in Blue" was the least important piece of music Gershwin ever wrote, but it has a great significance in the life of our time. To this day nobody quite knows where Gershwin's contribution to that piece left off and where the arranger's began. Ferdie Grofe, you see, contributed largely to the success of the Rhapsody. He orchestrated it, he adapted it from Gershwin's skeleton conception ; it is said that he composed many passages in it. By ordinary standards the "Rhapsody in Blue" is not good music. Still less is it good jazz. Gershwin was not a composer of jazz; he was a song writer whose songs were written in a form which lent itself to dancing. But between them Gershwin and Grofe succeeded in convincing the man-in-the-street that the "Rhapsody in Blue" was something out of the ordinary. Modern music, you must remember, was, and still is, out of touch with the "ordinary" listener. Light music still had its public, but it was limited. A new generation, weaned on ragtime, found life a little flat, a little lacking in "pep." The "Rhapsody in Blue" was just what they wanted, and they went for it. Another thing that helped the popularity of the "Rhapsody in Blue" was that it was one of the few pieces of music played by larger orchestras than the listeners could remember. It was full of "tunes." That is to say, it was full of easily remembered snippets of melody — one bar, two bars in length, which is about as much as the average listener can remember these days He convinced Broadwayites and their prototypes all over the world that they were listening to "sophisticated" art, and that jazz had at last acquired some aesthetic standing. But I persist in calling Gershwin a composer of light music and a song-writer. He wrote it is true, in the style of jazz. "I Got Rhythm" has been the peg to hang many a "swing" record on. But for the most part his music was only incidentally dance music. You've heard Sophie Tucker sing "The Man I Love"? Well, you can't dance when she sings it because it is purely and simply a twentieth-century ballad, sung freely and with the traditional "expression" of the music-hall. Certainly there will be no more rhapsodies in blue. The cult of "swing" whatever you may think of it, is a cult for keeping jazz in its place. Gershwin tried to take it out of that place. Which was a pity, for it was a hopeless task, and the boy had a whale of a lot of talent for a different kind of music. — The Daily Express. 19