Funny Films

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 72, 17 December 1938, Page 9 (Supplement)

Funny Films

Children Are Often Afraid Of Them

'THE cowboy Buck Jones is the children’s favourite film star, and Westerns their favourite type of feature film. "Daisy Bell” just creeps ahead of the “Lambeth Walk” as the best-liked song for community singing. They boo foreign dictators I and cheer English royalties. These are some of the facts of children’s preferences disclosed by a questionnaire carried out among the managers of 142 leading English cinemas where special children’s matinees have been established.

'The inquiry covers 151,000 children, of whom 55 per cent, are boys. The ages of the children vary from three to 14, and three-quarters of them attend regularly (three out of four performances). . Their four favourite film stars are: Buck Jones, Shirley Temple, Jane ‘ Withers and Tim McCoy (cowboy), in that order.

Royalty Cheered. *

Out of 42 film stars named, Will Hay came sixth, Lightning (a horse), fourteenth, Mickey Mouse sixteenth, Gracie Fields eighteenth, Donald Duck twentynineth, Jack Hulbert thirty-first, Clark Gable thirty-sixth, and Sonja Henie thirty-ninth.

Children cheer news-reels. They cheer British battleships, because (the framers of the report believe) their patriotic instincts are stirred. They always clap heroes and popular personalities.

They boo wrongdoers and losers. They cheer the winners of races, for example, and boo the defeated. Their preference in films is simply and wholly* framed in the word “action.” As long as something is happening they like it. Dialogue to them Is a waste of time. The children’s motive in coming to the cinema is to see pictures, and they do not allow that to be forgotten. Children are becoming more sophisticated, and when they are cinema patrons they like to be treated as grown-ups. Damage by Penkinve's. However, a certain childishness survives, as one manager, for example, reports that there is a good deal of damage done to -the seats at a children’s performance. He attributes this to 11-year-old boys just given their first penknife. Another manager reports that in his einema (in a big working population area) the children always stand and sing the National Anthem. A good deal of attention was paid to - items that made children afraid. They dislike gruesome and grotesque figures and effects. “Pluto’s Judgment Day” came in for a great deal of criticism on this scote. . I They are afraid of ogres and spiders, Chinese villains, obvious suffering. of the hero and heroine, animals leaping at human beings, sudden explosions, cruelty in any form. Sometimes excitement merges into something very near real fear.

Forty-two per cent, of managers thought that Charlie Chaplin is still popular, 30 per cent, thought he was not. A certain number believed him to be unknown to children except by name.

■VOUR of the talented young actors x from the “Dead End” cast are to play featured supporting roles in a boy scout picture starring Jackie Cooper. The boys are David Gorcey, Halley Chester, Lester Jay and Charles Duncan. Two of them, Gorcey and Chester, had important roles in “Little Tough Guy.” The scout picture is. to be made by Universal in collaboration with the boy scouts of America.