PICTURES WITH IDEAS

Southland Times, Issue 23815, 12 May 1939, Page 19

PICTURES WITH IDEAS

Social Influences At

Hollywood

CONFLICT OF OPINION IN AMERICA

It does seem, sometimes, as if Hollywood exists entirely outside the world of ideas and critics to announce this fact have been numerous and vehement. But if this has been true of Hollywood —and there is some evidence, which I shall attempt to show, that it has not been altogether so—it has not been true of the motion picture in some of its less Hollywoodian aspects, says a writer in The Christian Science Monitor.

Yet I do not quite like to separate movies into Hollywood films and foreign films, either, with respect to this problem of ideas. By ideas, I mean those concerned more especially at the present time with social responsibility. A good deal has been made of the fact that while Hollywood was producing its little story of boy meets girl in a hundred different fashions, the films of Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Dovzhenko, and other Russians were managing to say something important, even though tinged with a particular sort of political propaganda. ■ This issue has been more intensified in Hollywood, perhaps, than it has outside, particularly among the members of the writers’, directors’ and actors’ guilds. The argument for the anti-Hollywood viewpoint has been somewhat strengthened by the excellent French films of Clair and Duvivier and Renoir; by the veritable renaissance of the English film, which began with Korda’s “King Henry VIII,” and runs right down to the present day; and by some outstanding documentary films both in England and the United States, comprising, in the former, the films of John Grierson, and in America “The March of Time,” and the two Federal films of Pare Lorentz, “The Plough That Broke The Plains” and “The River.” TWO SCHOOLS OF. THOUGHT The controversy over whether films should “say something,” or whether they should stick to the tried and true road of entertainment purely as such, has divided and is dividing film makers and film commentators. And that that divergence is wholly artificial seems to me self-evident. Nevertheless, _it is growing, and may yet engulf audiences as well. There have recently sprung up several important groups bent on seeing that Hollywood’s film makers stop dallying with petty plots and begin to reflect some of the sterner realities in the world about them. Most important of these, probably, is one known as Films For Democracy, numbering on its advisory board some famous writers, judges, professors, and educators. It threatens, if Hollywood films do not do something about their indifference to the tide of intolerance and reaction which is sweeping the world, to produce films of its own and release them —if the Hollywood producers will not take them—through the country’s labour organizations. Another such organization, listing among its affiliated membership perhaps 50 important educational church, labour, social, cultural, racial, youth, fraternal, farm, veteran and consumer organizations, from The American Civil Liberties Union to the Y.M.C.A., and from the United Automobile Workers of America to the Motion Picture Committee of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, demands that the producers make more pictures on the order of “Zola,” “Pasteur,” “The Informer,” “Blockade,” “They Won’t Forget,” “Black Legion,” and “Fury,” and confine themselves less to “Boy Gets Girl,” “Reporter Gets Scoop,” “Cop Catches Robber,” “Cowboy Ropes Steer.”

AIMS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS I do not see anything, wrong with the objectives of these organizations—and, indeed, if Hollywood does not find some way to improve its product, there can be little doubt that it will awaken one day not long from now to find its erstwhile audiences drifting out of its theatres to entertainment more to their liking. I applaud their ambition to make their own pictures if Hollywood fails to be persuaded. Yet I would point out to such as wish to do these things that back of the films they approve lies something more than enthusiasm for an idea. Pudovkin, in his film writings, gives full credit to D. W. Griffith for originating an art of movie making which the Russian carried to great heights in “Storm Over Asia"; and there is ample evidence that Eisenstein and Dovzhenko also went to school to the early American director. More than that, students of social aspects will not look in vain for a welldeveloped social consciousness in Griffith. The French avant-garde film students have long been admirers of Chaplin and Disney, in both of whom a very advanced art of cinema and a developed social consciousness seem evident. Brierson and Lorentz have been close students of cinema art—indeed, were authorities on it before they ever cranked the handle of a camera. It would be encouraging to have more evidence that the people who want socially-significant films, and want them in the least possible time, were also interested in having those films be good pictures, merely as such. QUALITY OF FILMS The film “Blockade” may have been laudable in arguments, but it certainly was not a good film. “Pasteur” and “Zola,” however, were well-made films. If their success is any indication, there definitely is a market for films which say something, if they say it reasonably well. Nor can there ever be any question of the right of a producer, independent or otherwise, to make a provocative picture, if he is willing to take the consequences in audience friendship or antagonism—or both.

A too strict censorship is at present threatening to do more harm to the cause of good pictures than any other single thing. Against this there will certainly be reaction of one sort or another; and it may be that the very organizations named have sprung up in opposition to letting films be strangled by their self-appointed censors. One thing, at least, seems certain. The audience will in the end decide what sort of films Hollywood is to make. There is no lack of enthusiasm here for the most advanced form of films —social, economic, artistic. The crust over the profitable distribution of such films, however, seems to be too thick to allow them to break through. Writers and directors and players by the score are ready and willing to offer their services to the making of better films if producers, and their censors, and present highly questionable business methods, ever suffer the gates to open, as I am inclined to think they shortly will. For where there is profit, the average Hollywood producer is not far behind. And in the near future it may be profitable to make advanced, intelligent, and provocative films as it now is profitable to hug close to their antitheses.