The Moral Movies
THE MORAL MOVIES MR. MILLIKEN'S reply to Canon Chase's latest indictment of Will Hays and his motion-picture bureau is not what we should call effective. It is vigorous but not plausible. We offer...
...During the past several years we have not been scrupulously attentive to the films, but with everyone else we have seen the pictures of which Hollywood has been most proud the finest flowering of the industry under the great moral and educational influence of Mr...
...We doubt whether Mr...
...He describes the motion-picture industry as cooperating "during the past several years" (since the appearance of Mr...
...Milliken returns elated...
...Milliken rather than with Mr...
...Hays's and Mr...
...We go and see people killing time...
...Milliken means by "scientific opinion," but our guess is that he means something quite unscientific...
...When Mr...
...Sothern's agitation is of a different character...
...E. H. Sothern goes and sees "these wide-mouthed, pop-eyed men and women drinking in filth and vulgarity...
...Hays can guarantee anything at all about the "moral impression" which a film will convey...
...Milliken is tempted to base action, he need only go to a movie to recover his spiritual equanimity, but that is certainly the last place to which anyone would advise Mr...
...Of course we have no very clear notion of the duties of Mr...
...To determine precisely whether the cinema is a "positive deterrent" to crime, or whether it actually inspires it, would be a task in which all the learned societies, universities, high schools, parent-teacher associations, prison welfare leagues and fact-finding agencies in the world might unsuccessfully engage...
...Hays, of course) "with more than four hundred responsible religious, civic and educational groups...
...As we remember, it was said that Mr...
...Sothern to go for help in his wrestlings with Satan...
...Hays would become the Kenesaw Mountain Landis of the films, and everyone knows that Judge K. M. Landis was asked to become the czar of baseball in order to assure the public that the scandals of 1919 would not be repeated...
...Hays's bureau can guarantee that the average intelligent citizen will react to any given picture with Mr...
...What he has seen has brought out all the murderous sentiments of a soul which has been nurtured on the noblest thoughts of all the ages, and which is normally filled to overflowing with goodwill toward men...
...Milliken goes to the movie house and sees a thousand seekers after truth and culture being edified and educated...
...Milliken throws some light on this subject...
...Our conclusion is that the channel needs dredging...
...One can only poke around the problem...
...what he has seen has given a lift to his stride, and wings to his soul, but Mr...
...It must be good for the business, or they would not hold their jobs...
...Now we doubt whether Mr...
...Milliken's organization...
...We recall, rather vaguely, that Mr...
...Sothern...
...Hays was invited to become some sort of overseer of the industry, not because he knew anything at all about motion pictures, but because his moral integrity was unquestioned, and it was hoped that his name and presence would help to create public respect for the industry, which had been receiving a number of very black eyes...
...We do not know what Mr...
...We offer this sample: "Scientific opinion throughout the world has marshaled itself, after painstaking investigation, behind the premise that American motion pictures, produced under the voluntary safeguards now in force in Hollywood, are a positive deterrent to crime and wrong-doing...
...some of them obviously pleased, some of them obviously bored, but most of them quite indifferently getting rid of the evening...
...But that is all we remember...
...From these "cooperating elements" it asks nothing, but "on the contrary it has provided them with a channel, which they greatly desired, through which their influence and opinion on the maintaining and improvement of motion-picture standards could reach the makers of pictures in Hollywood...
Vol. 11 • January 1930 • No. 10
