AUSTRALIANS AN UGLY RACE.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19154, 10 November 1927, Page 11

AUSTRALIANS AN UGLY RACE.

FILM EDITOR'S VIEW.

CARELESS DRESS A HANDICAP. (by cable—pbzss ASSOClATlON—copybiqht.) UCBTKALIAH AND N.Z. CABLX ASSOCIATION.) SYDNEY, November 9. Giving evidence before the Film Commission, Robert Dexter, film editor and writer, said beauty was the merchandise of the motion-picture, and Australia was practically barren of beauty. Nature had made a wonderful job of this Continent, but, as human beings, Australians were an ugly race.

He declared that there were quite a numlier of people in Sydney who could make a comfortable living in Hollywood if they would only look natural. Referring to types seen in Sydney streets, Mr Dexter said he had seen only one man whom the rest of the world would accept as worth looking at on the screen in a leading role, and ho was a newspaper reporter. For screen purposes the features of the Australian people were all wrong, and careless dress was another handicap. The best dressed man in Sydney to-day could not hold his own with a five-dollar extra man at Hollywood.

During the past year there had been possibly eight girls in Australia who might have developed as acceptable screen players. Their teeth were naturally poor, and they lacked much in that perfect physical development required for the screen. In the matter of fashion Sydney women were 12 months behind New York styles. Australia was passing through a phase of industrial development, and until that was complete she had neither the time nor the money to spare for the cultivation of the arts —for the motion picture was an art, not an industry. He denied that the United States had taken advantage of the war to oust England from the Australian film market, and added that if America dropped out of the Australian business to-day there would be sufficient nictures in England to supply Australia's requirements for one and a-half weeks only.