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FROM HOLLYWOOD TO HOLYROOD

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED

It is unthinkable that Oxford should resent the arrival on the campus of the men with the cameras and the flaring breeches and the intention of "acquainting mankind with what Oxford stands for; to set forth in moving pictures the essential spirit of Oxford." Yet the Oxford "Isis" demands in a familiar style why "we should allow ourselves to be depicted as the trumpery actors in a roseate spectacle for colonial nincompoops?"

A single view of "Brown of Harvard" would have convinced the editors of the awful injustice of their judgment. For the English company offers to have a background that is authentic in the matter of students as well as of quadrangles. The actors will be real students, and yet they are not obliged to wear the pictorial slicker or the loud sweater that speaks. The millennium is nearing when England's well known love of fair play has reached her film companies. One learns with regret that Oxford students do not anticipate with pleasure a romance whose consummation would come on the steps of the chancel. Little do they know how one great love was knitted in the corridor of Stillman Infirmary.

There is only one detail upon which Oxford still lacks reassurance. Disillusioning though it be, Oxford must find out before it is too late who wrote the scenario. The idea of Cambridge stooping to such subterfuge is almost absurd; still, Caesar had his Brutus, Harvard its Donald Ogden Stewart, and Oxford may profit by their example.

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