In a powerful indictment of the movie tendency and the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Frederick Boyd Stevenson writes in the Brooklyn Eagle:
“On the other hand the reels are reeking with filth. They are slimy with sex plays. They are overlapping one another with crime.
“From bad to worse these conditions have been growing. The plea is set up that the motion picture industry is the fourth or fifth in the United States, and we must be careful not to disrupt it. A decent photoplay, it is argued, brings gross returns of, say, $100,000, while a successful sex play brings from $250,000 to $2,500,000.”
THE JEWISH ASPECT OF THE “MOVIE” PROBLEM 119 Dr. James Empringham was recently quoted in the New York World as saying; ‘‘I attended a meeting of motion picture owners in New York, and I was the only Christian present. The remainder of the com¬ pany consisted of 500 un-Christian Jews.”
Now, there is little wisdom in discoursing against evil in the movies and deliberately closing our eyes to the forces behind the evil.
The method of reform must change. In earlier years, when the United States presented a more gen¬ eral Aryan complexion of mind and conscience, it was only necessary to expose the evil to cure it. The evils we suffered from were lapses, they were the fruits of moral inertia or drifting; the sharp word of recall stiffened the moral fiber of the guilty parties and cleared up the untoward condition. That is, evil doers of our own general racial type could be shamed into decency, or at least respectability.