COWS AND MOVIES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 84, 10 April 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

COWS AND MOVIES.

A GREAT RESPONSIBILITY,

HO IX Y WOOD'S DEBT.

(By M.E.S.)

"So you see, if cows didn't like mustard, we shouldn't have any movies." I read the sentence twice; it sounded like something that A. A. Milne had unaccountably omitted to say, or a quotation from a newer Alice in Wonderland. But it was neither; on the contrary it was the considered utterance of a learned professor at one of the Christmas lectures on photography at the Royal Institute, and this is what he meant: One of the reasons why photographic materials are 60 peculiarly sensitive to light is because in their gelatine base there exists a small quantity of sulphur which is obtained from mustard oil. The gelatine is got from calf skins and the mustard oil from some of the green feed that cows eat. Perfectly simple and straight-forward, and yet, how amazing.

Cows and Movies . . . The connection appears at first sight fantastic enough. A vision rises to smite one of the domestic cow with its large, mild-eyed, melancholy, inane countenance, its weak, slobbering mouth, its expression of amiable idiocy. Now realise that, but for this creature's passion for certain types of green feed, there might nave been no George Arliss, no Greta Garbo, no Freddie Bartholomew . . . No, the idea is more than fantastic; it is positively. revolutionary. Suppose, for example, that our cows were to see fit to follow the example of our sisters and our cousins and our aunte, and become diet-ridden; suppose they decided that mustard was unduly heating to the blood, over-stimulating to the nervous system, disastrously polluting to the bloodstream, and banished it for ever from their daily menu? How long would it take for that necessary grain of sulphur to disappear from their system? Picture the scientists searching desperately in one calf skin after another, and then issuing the world-shaking fact: "There shall be no more films."

Chaos in Hollywood." What would be the result? How long would it take the film stars of greater or lesser magnitude to learn to live, work and marry like mere ordinary mortals ? Would the men join the ranks of the unemployed and the women enter domestic service? Picture the embarrassment of finding a Myrna Loy doing your washing or a Godfrey Tearle mowing your front lawn. How soon would Hollywood become a modern Pompeii, a city of the lost? Imagine the tourist of 2037 being shown round its crumbling streets, peering into those luxurious swimming pools that were once dedicated to the reflection of film stars' limbs, gazing at those mouldering studios that once were the scene of "the most stupendous spectacle in the history of the film"—nay, not once, but a hundred times. And what are they now? Mere heaps of junk and ruin— and all because of the fickle appetites of the humble cow.

How difficult to make the citizens of that new world understand the vast importance of this vanished industry, the immense seriousness of this lost art. "Moving pictures" . . . It sounds like a child's crude toy. How convince these men and women of the future that in 1937 a large proportion of the civilised world took their films more seriously than they took their wars and rumours of war; that, should the most devastating world crisis burst upon us at 7 p.m., our picture theatres would yet be filled at. 8.30? To appreciate all this, these great-grandchildren of ours will have to understand that this was an age of tragic uncertainty, of dreadful crisis which must at all costs be forgotten, and that for that reason alone any means of escape from reality was eagerly welcomed. And what escape easier or more accessible to the man in the street than that provided by this lost art that died too soon because of a cow's digestion?

On the Cow's Back. Some New Zealand writer, commenting on the importance of our dairying industry, once remarked that the whole of New Zealand rested upon the back of the cow. If that burden seemed considerable, what of this crushing weight that has now been added to it? The cow has since been proved to carry upon its patient back not merely the prosperity of a large number of hardworking men • and women, but the very existence of that most pampered and exotic of all sections of society—the film stars, the citizens of Hollywood. Nor is that the sole burden of its responsibility; it n.ust bear also the pleasure of the whole world, the only form of entertainment that is available to millions of men, women and children.

The mere thought is overwhelming. Having digested it in awed silence for some time, we tiptoed out and gazed with an anxious, new respect at the herd that was grazing peaceably in the paddock below the house. No sign of mutiny here. Most of the cows were slumbering in the summer sunshine, but a few of the more enterprising were lazily cropping the long grass. Let us hope that their feed contained the right and necessary proportion of mustard, a well-balanced ration that will serve not merely to nourish the herd, and with it the family that depends upon it, but also uncounted Shirley Temples and Joan Crawfords, not merely of to-day, but of the future.

A Debt of Gratitude. The whole world must be forced to recognise the magnitude of its debt to the humble cow; not for butter alone, for men may live without butter, but for that more necessary and vital provision—the amusement of the multitude. "The humble cow"—yes, few would deny the beast that becoming grace of humility. Yet with that quality there goes another which we find so often in the humble of this world—a certain gentle but dogged obstinacy, a contrariness which has been immortalised in our vocabulary as the very essence of "the fayre cow." Therefore it were wiser not to let the creature suspect her own omnipotence, lest, in. the true manner of "the fayre cow," she decide to change her diet forthwith and thereby at one fell stroke destroy the laughter and dry the tears of half the world. It were better, on the contrary, to handle her with a certain casual scorn, to relegate her to the despised class that merely produces necessities and not luxuries; in short, "to keep her in her place"—and that place the cowyard, not the picture theatre. Let her continue to chew the cud of humility and modest worth. This, we are given to understand, is the real reason why there exists in Hollywood no mammoth statue to the arbiter of the films' destinies, no cult of worship of this new and omnipotent deity.