SIN AND THE CINEMA

The movies have friends and foes of all degrees, from the optimist who says they are an added force of enlightenment, to the lugubrious individual who traces to them all the evils of a crime-ridden world. To suppose that a man, simply because he has seen a sensational movie, will be impelled to go home and murder his grandparents for their inheritance, elope with his neighbor's wife, and wreck two trains and a house in the process, is patently ridiculous. Yet there is a grain of truth in the allegation which cannot be denied--many movies of today are to some extent responsible for loweringmen's standards of right and wrong, especially in the case of impressionable youth. Frequent statements from the juvenile courts show the misdeed to be directly traceably to a recent movie. A boy in Connecticut not long ago caused a train-wreck by picking the switch-lock with a crowbar, a trick learned from the screen. Many young runaways, when caught, admit that their inspiration for the delights of the open road was gleaned from the silversheet.

If the movie can accomplish such wonders in an evil way, its potentialities for virtue must be equal. It is undeniably the most direct means of appealing to the people, throughout the country. Professor Baker has been quoted as saying that if he could be given absolute control of the moving-picture industry and its out-let for three years, he could raise the country's intelligence ten percent, and its morals in proportion. Whether he is right or not would depend on his method of atback. Obviously, if the movie lost its interest and became purely a moralizing agent, it would at once lose its audiences and some new form of diversion for the masses would spring up. It should take a genius to find plays that will both meet the people's demand for amusement and "uplift" them as well; it should take a greater genius to write them. Yet it can be done. Censorship boards are all very well; but their influence is merely passive. Any real improvement in the tone of the movies must begin at the bottom.