ENGLISH FILMS'

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 4, 6 January 1926, Page 6

ENGLISH FILMS'

A FRANK OPINION.

Mr. Caradoc Evans, addressing ths British Motion Pictures Advertisers Society in London, had some irajnK things to say of British films. Ine test of the popularity of a book, ho said, was how many persons would steal copies of it. A boot not worth stealing was not worth reading. The test of a film play was how many boys and girls were tempted to squeeze themselves in for nothing. A free seat to witness a film that nobody wanted to see-was an insult when one considered that the price of the programme was twopence. He reckoned that if seats were offered to 10 000 people to witness a British nlm tlie number that would occupy those seats might fill the very smallest theatre in London. A face like a new-laid egg perched over a ™ir of sparkling legs would not maY (in actress, nor. would bandy legs sh .us themselves in phis fours make uu actor. But these were the types the British producers showed the public—types shown by agents who would fail as cattle dealers, by producers who would be sacked as potmen, and financed by financiers who would not succeed as floor-walkers. Neither cave us anything for our money. , There was nothing in the British pictures that attracted him. British pictures had neither a- spiritual nor a eastt value. The only way of attracting people to British films was to give them the price of the scats for which they did not pay before the show bewail, lne Englishman would take almost anything for nothing. He was the world s ideal deadhead. Billingsgate knew mo c about the psychology of the Bntish public than.the producer °t picture Plojs. He felt again that the British P>et"£«, fed playgocri with wrongly constructed and wrongly punctuated sub-titles.