TREND TO SATIRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21153, 9 April 1932, Page 11 (Supplement)

TREND TO SATIRE.

MOVEMENT IN AMERICA. "A HEALTHY ATTITUDE." One of the chief characteristics of the film-maker is his simian imitativeness, writes Mr. James Douglas in the Daily Express. We have had war films, backstage films, gang films, tarnished lady films, and now horror films, with ' The Murders in the Rue Morgue," " The Suicide Club," "Freaks," and heaven knows how many more still to come. Now another fashion is starting happily of a healthier and more amusing kind. The latest craze in America is for satire. " The American man in the street is fed up," according to the brilliant Columbia director, Frank Capra. " Politics, prohibition, patriotism, big business, high-powered advertising, are subjects ripe for ridicule." Mr. Capra quotes the success of " Of Thee I Sing "—an exposure of crooked politics in America—as a proof of the new trend. The three million sale of the new magazine, " Ballyhoo," ridiculing all that the American business man has always held sacred, is one of many other proofs that Americans, roused from complacency by misfortune, are developing a new cynicism, a keener sense of humour. Will the new fashion reach our own studios ? Mr. Douglas doubts it. Most English people have no appreciation of satire, he says. At least, that is what many observers have said, and they quote the failure of such plays as " Beggar on Horseback," " The Rumour," " Spread Eaglo " and " Topaze " to prove it. All of which is very odd indeed when you remember that some of the most popular writers in our history—from Swift, Fielding and Byron to Butler and Bernard Shaw —have been nothing if not satrical. The obvious explanation is that the ! public which buys books is more cultured than the hundredfold greater public which supports films. There are tens of thousands of cultured film-goers, but they j are too few and too scattered to be a dominating factor at the box office. That their numbers are comparatively small is, as a reader points out, mainly the fault of the film people.