IN FILMLAND.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVIII, Issue 17662, 24 December 1920, Page 3 (Supplement)

IN FILMLAND.

An attempt to dramatise the relations between Capital and Labour was made in England recently in a picture called " Build Thy House," with Henry Ainley as the hero. Many months a,go a prize of £200 was offered for a story that would point the way to a permanent relationship which would make for the good of the world. More than a hundred stories were sent in by people in all walks of life, including miners and engineers. Unly sis of the writers avoided violence, and it was to one of these, a Londoner, that the prize was awarded. The judges were a well-known Labour M.P., a novelist, and. a journalist, and their verdict was unanimous. An early release of the picture, which will arouse considerable interest in industrial centres, is promised for next February. In America, says a London paper, il would have been on the screens of New York neit week. Thero is at present, a desire on the part of film companies to reduce the size of their stage crowds. From most modest beginnings these bands of supernumeraries have grown to enormous proportions in the competition for supremacy, and it is said in a big British film now in course of production about 12,000 people will have been employed at various times and 3000 in a single scene. At the present rate of wages the expense for this kind of luxury must b© enormous. Tom Moore has been taking moving pictures of his little daughter Alice ever since she was born. He keeps his collection in a fireproof vault.

During 1919 England was flooded with sex pictures. Nearly half of the whola number, which exceeded 2000, were refused a universal certificate by the trade censors; that it to say, they were pictures that were not fit to be shown to childi-en and young people. Twenty-eight pictures were refused absolutely. There were 253 pictures containing bedroom and bathroom scenes of such a character that the censors insisted upon their elimination before exhibition. Time and again it has been urged that the film is becoming so important and the supply of comedy is so poor that the day must come when authors of repute will find it worth their while to pay attention to the new method of interpretation and to construct comedy stories specially for this medium. There seems to be every reason to believe that that day has dawned. Sir James Barrio, Mr. Bernard Shaw, and many other celebrated Englishmen are reported to be at work ou scenarios intended primarily for film purposes, and now we have had the first actual product of this new movement in the form of three short comedies written by Mr. A. A. Milne. Mr. Milne's films are admittedly an experiment, but his work shows what a vast field can be opened up to the writer with ideas, not merely in the film itself, but in the subtitles and oven in the explanatory programme. It is good burlesque of the screen craze for the colossal to be told, for instance, that "it is estimated 13,973.534 hooks are employed in the library scenes." that the firm's private poo is headed by Tarzipan, the great bull ape, and that one of Mr. Milne's heroes owns an island in the Hebrides—"l forget which one, but I think it is the second on the left." One expects this kind of jest from Mr Milne, and would have been disappointed if it had not had its place in tho scheme of the films. Quite the best °f the three pictures submitted is " The Bump," with .Mr. Aubrey Smith as a strong, silent, stern-jawed explorer (who on Mondav would shoot a grizzly and a gazeke with two barrels.? while on Tuesday he would shoot Niagara with one barrel) But on all his expeditions he had been accompanied by crowds of natives, and when a charming lady invited him in visit her at Stuccoway Terrace in a London suburb on a Sunday afternoon, he realised to his horror that he would have to make the expedition alone. His bump of locality failed him, and for three months he walked in his effort t-o find the house. When he arrived, unshaved and -unkempt, it was to discover that the lady was just setting off on a honeymoon -with a young man who had invented a new jazz step. Mr. Aubrey Smith' 3 performance is described as dehekras. ISBSSOS- sSaAm&sssm,