THE CINEMA
The More the Merrier." At the Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion Is the public tired of war pictures and clamouring only for films of escape? This is a problem which is now being widely debated by the tycoons of the film industry on both sides of the Atlantic. In the United States the influential Matson Picture Herald has printed a number of protests from exhibitors regarding the flood of war films. Typical comments are that " the average people come to the movies to escape . . . from the stark realities that face them on every side. When they leave our theatres today they are depressed and unhappy," and that the producers must now make " good comedies, musicals or light dramas, with only a very rare out-and- out war picture." Less drastic, but on a similar line of thought, have been recent statements by members of the British film trade.
This situation raises the whole question of cinema's role in war- time. Is it, in fact, the job of the film to provide only relaxation and escape? Or should it use its enormously cogent powers of visual and aural persuasion to inspire and consolidate the great movement in men's hearts and minds towards the century of the common man on whose threshold we now stand? Clearly, the public will not tolerate in their visits to the cinema the film as a schoolmarm or a preacher, but there is perhaps a need for a change of heart in the cinema industry, in which the raising of the level of public appreciation should play a major part. Even in the world of " comedies, musicals and, light dramas " there are differing levels of taste' and there is no reason why the makers of films should assume that the lower rather than the higher is the more acceptable and the more profitable. Perhaps, indeed, a closer study of the problem might reveal that the public is not tired of war films as such, but tired of the sort of war films which are being made at this time. To attach a stock melodramatic story to a war theme, be it set in arsenal or jungle or the paths of the sky, is not perhaps a formula which will recom- mend itself to people who feel so acutely, not merely the facts of the present conflict, but also the issues arising therefrom. Box-office receipts may tell their own story, but a handful of war films of the calibre of In Which We Serve, Airforce, Desert Victory and Nine Men are at least arguing points for the theory that the cinemagoer is not unappreciative of war subjects treated with at least the elemen- tary decencies. John Grierson in a message to British documentary film makers put the positive point of view bluntly when he demanded the jettisoning of " the cathartic finishes in which a good brave tearful self-congratulatory and useless time has been had by all." He added: " The box-office, pandering to what is lazy, weak, reactionary, vicarious, sentimental and essentially defeatist in all of us, will of course instinctively howl for them. It will want to make `relaxation' if you please, even out of war. But deep down, the people want to be fired to tougher ways of thought and feeling and
to have their present braveries extended to the very roots of their social existence. In that habit they will win more than a war."
All of which brings us to the consideration of the latest and very amusing example of Hollywood escapism, which is significant also for the fact that its comedy is built round an exclusively war-time phenomenon. The fantastic overcrowding of Washington has become —in the U.S.A.—a national joke, and George Stevens, who directed The More the Merrier, has used it as the mise en scene for a story which veers pleasantly between out-and-out farce and something near true comedy. Against a background in which officials, indus- trialists, stenographers, and Service representatives jostle for priorities and pay at least lip service to the urgencies of war, we behold Joel Macrea and Jean Arthur moving unsteadily—but none the less certainly—towards the legal consummation of their mutual attraction, aided and abetted by the benevolent Charles Coburn, whose final act is to remove, in its entirety; the party wall which has been the barrier between two bedrooms. This feat of carpentry, one hastily adds, is not carried out before the legal ceremonies of matrimony have been performed.
Most of the film is exceedingly funny and well directed. But it is some fifteen minutes too long, a fault due to the new Hollywood technique of creating an electric atmosphere of sexual suspense by the slow and painstaking accumulation of scenes between the two lovers. In these scenes constraint and casualness are used as deli- cate wisps of smoke whose cumulation in a cloud of soft-focus close- ups is the only indication of the fires of love smouldering, sup- pressed and violent, beneath the facade of civilised behaviour.
BASIL WRIGHT.
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