• U.S.

Cinema: What’s Wrong with the Movies

2 minute read
TIME

Rank & file U.S. movie exhibitors may not care much about cinematic art for its own sake, but they know what they want from Hollywood. Last week the exhibitors drew some conclusions from their box-office receipts. After polling its exhibitor-members across the nation, the Allied States Association announced: Hollywood’s pictures (and advertising) have been truckling to the tastes of “sophisticated Broadway audiences” and “professional reviewers,” and run a serious risk of becoming “class entertainment.”

The exhibitors had some specific beefs and advice:

¶ The public is getting tired not only of “sordidness and crime” but also of that cinematic staple, sex. Small-town and neighborhood audiences want more wholesome stuff, i.e., nature, children and animals that the family can safely see.

¶”The million-dollar cast is a bust.”

¶Story material is trite and runs too much to cycles, e.g., the rash of psychological thrillers.

¶Musicals are “quite often … a gamble,” and new formulas must be cooked up. “For God’s sake,” said one exhibitor, “quit making backstage musicals.”

¶Pictures are getting so long that they “droop and die in the middle.”

¶ “We have had a great deal of glorification of the Catholic and Jewish religions. We must not lose sight. . . that the vast majority of our people, and our critics, are of the Protestant faith.”

¶Hollywood has been lax in failing to clean up the private lives of sinful stars. Instead, some producers have deplorably chosen to make capital of their “outrageous exploits.”

¶ “Exhibitors are agreed that they have never had a first-class western that was a box-office failure.”

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