WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE MOVIES?
What's Wrong with the Movies ? By Tamar Lane. (The Waverley Co.) What's Wrong with the Movies ? By Tamar Lane. (The Waverley Co.)
Ma. TAMAR LANE writes at the top of his lungs ; and, unfor- tunately, this peculiar method of attack on the reader, though lively and provocative, is not likely to endear him to average English' readers. It is equally unfortunate that his book, though full of apt and biting criticism and suggestions will hardly interest that section of the public which, because it. cannot overlook the poorness of many films, deprives itself by a total lack of interest in the cinema of the few excellent productions which somehow or other appear each year.
What is Wrong with the Movies? does all the same pink the films' present weaknesses very deftly. Perhaps the most useful attack is the one levelled against the American directors for their mercenary outlook, and certainly the most valuable suggestion is that some of those millionaire producers should earmark a percentage of their profits from bad and remunera- tive pictures for the financing of good ones. This is not unpractical, for even the most hardened Midas is -liable to cravings for prestige as well as for riches, and universal prestige can nowhere more easily be acquired than through the making of sincerely good films. / t the moment all the prestige is being acquired by German _
Mr. Tamar Lane is right, too, in saying that the public is largely to blame for the badness of the average film : there would be no supply if there were no demand. But one wishes he had emphasized the power which the minority, who either wait uncomplaining for the rare film-masterpiece, or else turn disgusted from the cinema altogether, might exercise, if it cared, by agitating for a few more intelligent pieces and in taking the trouble to find them out and to support them when they are, as they are occasionally, produced. This is all that can be done until we are given, as Mr. Tamar Lane suggests, a transcontinental chain of" smaller and more select theatres" which will house both the better films and the more discriminating audiences.
What's Wrong with the Movies? includes lists of the best films yet produced, and even more useful lists of those hack- neyed cinematographic effects, both in comedy and in drama, with which we could dispense. No director of films should proceed with his work before running through this book ; audiences, on the other hand, will find pleasure of a kind, after reading it, in spotting the old gags—the "heroines starving in sealskins, satins, manicured fingernails and marcel waves," and the comedian who "accidentally sits on the stove and is forced to run out into the street and project his nether quarters into a pool of water."
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