"Rhythm on the Range." At The Carlton The Cinema BING
CROSBY as a cowboy : Bing Crosby crooning. a prize bull to' sleep on a freight car : Bing Crosby more than ever like Walt Disney's Cock Robin : it needs some stamina 0 be a film reviewer. Only the conviction that a public art should be as popular and unstibtle as a .dance tune enableS one to sit with patient hope through pictures certainly unsubtle but not, in any real sense, popular. What a.chancle for the creative artist, one persists in believing, to produce for an audience incomparably greater than that, of all • the " popular novelists combined, from Mr. Walpole, to Mr. Brett Young, a genuinely vulgar art. Any other is impossible, The novelist may write for a few thousand readers, .hut the film artist must work for millions. It should he his distinction and pride that he has a public whose needs have never been met since the closing of the theatres by Cromwell. But where is the vulgarity of this art ? Alas ! the refinement of the " popular " novel has touched the films ; it is the twopenny libraries they reflect rather than the Blackfriars Ring, the Wembley final, the pin saloons, the coursing.
"I'm not the type that I seem to be, Happy-go-lucky and gay," Bing Crosby mournfully croons. That is the common, idea of popular entertainment, a mild self-pity, something soothing, something gently amusing. The film executive still thinks in terms of the " popular " play and the " popular " novel, of a limited middle-class audience, of the tired business man and the feminine reader. The public which rattles down from the North to Wembley with curious hats and favours, tipsy in charabancs, doesn't, apparently, ask to be soothed ; it asks to be excited. It was for these that the Elizabethan stage provided action which could arouse as communal a response as bear-baiting. For a popular response is not the sum of private excitements, but mass feeling, mass excite- ment, the Wembley roar, and it is the weakness of the Goldwyn Girls that they are as private an enjoyment as the Art Photos a business man may turn over in the secrecy of his study ; the weakness of Bing Crosby's sentiment, the romantic nostalgia of " Empty saddles in the old corral," that it is by its nature a private emotion.
There are very few examples of what I mean by .the proper popular use of the film, and most of those are farces ; Duck Soup, the early Chaplins, a few " shorts " by Laarell and Hardy. These do convey the sense that the picture,112.4. been made by its spectators and not merely shown to them, that it has sprung, as much as their sports, from their, level. Serious films of the kind are even rarer : perhaps, Fary, Le Million, Men and Jobs, they could be numbered on. the fingers of one hand. Because they are so rare one is -ready to accept, with exaggerated gratitude, such refined, elegant, dead pieces as Louis Pasteur : the Galswortliy entertainments of the screen : or intelligently 'adapted plays like These Three.
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People' want to be taken out of themselves," the film executive retorts under the mistaken impression that the critic is demanding a kind of Zola-esque realism—as. if Webster's plays were realistic. Of course he is right. People are taken out of themselves at Wembley. But I very much doubt if Bing Crosby does so. much. " They don't want to be depressed," but an excited andience is never depressed : if yOu excite your audience fast, you can put over what you will of horior, suffering, truth. But there is one question to which there is no answer. How dare we excite an audience, a producer may well ask, when Lord Tyrrell, the President of the Board of Censors, forbids us to show any controversial subject on the screen ?
Perhaps I ought to add that Rhythm ore the Range is quite a tolerable picture with a few scenes which do deserve to be, called popular cinema and an excellent new comedian, Mr. Bob Burns. I think one might even find a place, in one's ideal popular cinema, for Mr. Crosby : he represents per nument, if disagreeable, human characteristics of nostalgia and self-pity : I would have him bobbing abOut at the back of the
scrimmage like a worried referee or like an Elizabethan clown crooning his lugubrious reminders. GRAHAM GREENE.
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