NO ORCHIDS FOR OLIVER TWIST
Sig,—As an American enjoying—really enjoying—English hospitality this summer, it has interested me to read on every side the attacks made by English critics on the physical brutality which marks so many motion pictures made in the United States. I have echoed those attacks with approval ; there is no excuse, artistic, financial or otherwise, for the baths of rapine which emerge from the Hollywood studios. just for the record, however (and lest your critics should miss the point in passing), I have just witnessed, in a British motion picture, two hours of brutality and sadism so unrelieved that Hollywood's most extravagant imaginations would find it difficult to outdo them. Whatever reverence may be due to Charles Dickens ought not to obscure the fact that Oliver Twist, on the screen, reaches a new cinema high in blood-lust and child-torture. It is, incidentally, very faithful to the novel.—Sincerely yours.
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