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Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19994, 10 November 1927, Page 7

HOME TRUTHS

AUSTRALIAN FACES Not Good Enough for Hollywood, Expert Says ABT AND THE MOVIES. (By Telegraph—Per Press Assn.—Copyright.) (A. and'N.Z.) SYDNEY, Nov. 9. Giving evidence before the Film Commission, Robert Dexter, film editor and writer, said that beauty was the merchandise of the motion picture, and Australia was practically barren of beauty. Nature had made a wonderful job of the continent, but as human beings the Australians were an ugly race. He declared' that there were numbers of people in Sydney who could make a comfortable living in Hollywood if they would only look natural. Referring to the types seen in Sydney streets, he had seen only one man whom the rest of the world would accept as worth looking at on the screen in a leading role, and he was a newspaper reporter. For screen purposes the features of 'the Australian people were all wrong and careless dress was another handicap. The best dressed man in Sydney to-day could not hold his own with a five-dollar extra at Hollywood. During the past year there had been possibly eight girls in Australia who might have developed as acceptable screen players. Their teeth were naturally poor and they lacked much of that perfect physical deevlopment required for the screen. In the matter of fashion Sydney women were twelve months behind New York styles.

Australia was passing through a phase of industrial development anf. until that was complete she had neither time nor money to spare for the cultivation of arts, for the motion picture was an art and not an industry. He denied that the United States had taken advantage of the war to oust England from the Australian film market, and added that if America dropped out of the Australian business today, there would be sufficient pictures in England to supply Australia’s requirements for one and a-half weeks only.