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Otago Daily Times, Issue 18676, 4 October 1922, Page 6

“The cafe was crowded. Hundreds, of prosperous, fat, jovial, contented-looking German business men sat at the tables. AA T ith them were their wives, arrayed in summer furs, sparkling jewels, and gowns cut alter the latest Paris mode. . . The sidewalk crowds were better dressed than tho people of London or Paris: the show windows were riled with luxury goods of all sorts. . . This is merely introductory In tho dazzling picture of reckless extravagance and lavish magnificence drawn by Mr Otis Swift, correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, in his representation of life as he saw it at Hamburg. The picture is said to be equally true .of Berlin and other Gorman cities. In conjunction with German talk of economic breakdown, national bankruptcy and impending collapse, such a. manifestation is calculated to astonish the visitor to the country. The explanation which is given is that it is useless for the German to attempt. to save money m the face of the exchange collapse. If he raves his earnings he will find the hoarded money merely scrap-paper in a few months. By buying to the limit of his pay, by spending every pfennig as soon as P is made, he cr.n obtain real tangible prop.-ry and whatever the future price of the mark he will have actual assets m his possession. Therefore, he spends “ the artistic but

useless hundred-mark notes” as fast as possible lest he should find that they have but half their purchasing power by the morrow’s morn. This spending orgy, wo are told, has broken down the German moral and increased to fantastic proportions the scale of living of hundreds of thousands of persons, for Germany has lost all money perspective and lives only for the moment. “Mad buying,” says the'American commentator, ‘‘ has speeded up production to an abnormal degree; goods are being bought faster than they are being produced. Money has become valueless, but at the same time Germany s floating capital is being consumed, her national margin of living is being exhausted. Thus, the time is coming, and coming scon, when this real capital wBl be exhausted, when all the goods are gone, when the margin is wiped out. Beyond this margin lies the chaos that the wiser, older leaders fear.”

The cinema, with whatever it stands for, has become so much an established institution that its claim to attention from the national industrial standpoint has to he recognised as a matter of course. In the earlier phases cf cinema work British producers held supremacy. To-day they are pondering why there is no serious British rivalry to that enormous American activity of film production for which it is boasted that it is the third largest industry in the United States. An antidote to the Americanisation of the picture films is long overdue. The Cinema Commission of Inquiry cf 1917 estimated that the number of attendances at picture theatres in the course of that single year for the British Isles alone was 1,075,875,000. “For a large proportion of this formidable total,” writes Mr Alder Anderson in the Da>ly Telegraph, “ the screen, it may be carefully assumed, supplies almost all their mental nourishment. As nine out of ten cf the films exhibited are made in America, with a subtle tendency to exalt Americanism of every description, it is no wonder that American influence' is spreading in all directions. This knowledge alone ought to stimulate our producers to do as much and more in so vast a. field.” Mr Anderson points out the likely effect of the great predominance of American films on the outlook of the people of the oversea dominions, where the picture-going habit has been strongly developed. Confirmation of the axiom “trade follows the film” is said to be found in the statistics showing an increased export trade from the United States to countries—South American communities, for which formerly went elsewhere for certain articles they needed. It is suggested that what is required of the British producers is “ a new spirit of courageous adventure,” for they cannot complain of the dimensions of their market, seeing that, when the British Empire is taken into consideration, ‘ over 4C0,000,000 people are waiting to welcome films made in Great Britain, if our producers will only give them what they want.” .