American life is bare and meager to the Eastern mind. It is not sensuous enough. It is devoid of intrigue. Its women of the homes do not play continuously and hysterically on the sex motif. It is a life made good and durable by interior qualities of faith and quietness—and these, of course, are ennui and death to the Orientally minded.
There lies the whole secret of the movies’ moral failure: they are not American and their producers are racially unqualified to reproduce the American atmos¬ phere. An influence which is racially, morally and idealistically foreign to America, has been given the powerful projecting force of the motion picture busi¬ ness, and the consequences are what we see.
The purpose of this and succeeding articles is not to lift hands in horror and point out how rotten the movies are. Everybody is doing that. The case against the movies is not contested at all. It is unanimous. Women’s clubs, teachers, newspaper editors, police officers, judges of the courts, ministers of religion, physicians, mothers and fathers—every¬ body knows just what the movies are.
What all these disgusted groups evidently do not know is this: their protests will be entirely useless until they realize that behind the movies there is another group of definite moral and racial complexion to whom the protest of non-Jews amounts to next to nothing at all, if they can possibly circumvent it.