Cinema: Youth & Morals

(2 of 3)

When the Motion Picture Research Council was formed in 1927. its first aim was not only to set up and prove such neat generalities as the foregoing, but also to arm itself with a body of expert psychological opinion on the influence of the cinema upon minors. The Council's executive director, the Rev. William Harrison Short, got $200,000 from the Payne Fund and started hiring expert researchers. Last year the Council published its findings in a series called Motion Pictures and Youth (Macmillan), of which the 7th fat black volume appeared in November. This winter the M. P. R. C. has been getting ready for the second phase of its program—to persuade or compel the cinema industry to produce better (i. e. more moral) pictures. First step was to acquire active officers with influential names. Last month Dr. Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who had headed the Council after the death of John Grier Hibben, stepped up and out of the picture by becoming honorary president. To succeed him as president, the Council elected Mrs. August Belmont, who before her marriage was Actress Eleanor Robson. For her George Bernard Shaw wrote his ablest social service play, Major Barbara. Of late years Mrs. Belmont has been giving most of her energies to fund-raising for the relief of New York's jobless. For honorary vice presidents she had Mrs. Calvin Coolidge and Mrs. James Roosevelt, the President's mother. Last week, in Manhattan, the Council held its first "national lunch conference.'' Flanked by batteries of the M. P. R. C.'s research authorities and socialite backers, Mrs. Belmont outlined over a nationwide radio hookup the three main objectives in the latest U. S. campaign for more moral cinemas: 1) Elimination of "objectionable" films, 2) more pictures made specially for children, 3) right of a community to select films. Said the Council's new president: "We are starting a movement here which will spread across the country from coast to coast. There are literally thousands of little groups interested in better movies, and we are bringing them into this one movement. Mrs. Calvin Coolidge, our honorary vice president, is drawing in the junior leagues, the parents' leagues, the women's clubs and the other groups, so that we shall have the force of widespread concerted public opinion behind our efforts." Immediate plans of the M. P. R. C.: a $2 to $100 per year membership drive to replenish the exhausted Payne Fund; a campaign to end "block booking." To observers familiar with the cinema industry, the M. P. R. C.'s objections to block booking seemed a bad omen. Block booking is the system whereby exhibitors rent pictures in job lots instead of singly. It gives producers an outlet for their unpopular pictures; it gives exhibitors an excuse for exhibiting morally bad pictures. All reform agencies in the cinema have objected to block booking; none has ever made any headway in preventing it from becoming standard practice in the industry. Even such a product of the New Deal as the Cinema Code had to bow to block booking—a fact which caused Dr. Lowell to refuse a seat on the Code Authority (TIME, Jan. 1). Remarked cynical Terry Ramsaye in his Motion Picture Herald: "With a great flourish to publicity in the lay press it is announced that Mrs. August Belmont . . . is the new president of the Motion Picture Research Council. ... In