Twenty-five years ago, Father Martindale, writing on “The Movies” in the very first number of Blackfriars, decided that “the thing can be used as well as misused, like thyroid or theology”. Since he wrote, the situation has changed: it can no longer be said that in the cinema “voice-anxiety is eliminated”, and we are usually spared “Bishops wearing their mitres at the tea-table and Abbesses giving absolution”. The “hundreds of thousands” who visit the pictures weekly in this country have become as many millions. But the need for a solid basis of criticism is as urgent as ever. The vast technical development of the cinema, its tremendous commercial growth and social importance, have not been matched—at least not among Catholics—by much discrimination.

It is of little use any longer to deplore the existence of the cinema. It is firmly established as the most popular form of entertainment, and one supposes that Catholics are to be found in their proportion to the population as a whole among the weekly millions. There are many features of the cinemas as an industry which are certainly deplorable, but these should not prejudice an objective examination of the cinema as a medium, though in fact “what is wrong with the films?” can usually be traced back to “what is wrong with the Big Business behind them?” But it is difficult to envisage much change in the commercial side of the cinema: the tendency is all towards more mergers, more mammoth corporations spreading their tentacles from the studio right down to the local Ritz. For the cinema is not strictly an art; it is an industry which—among many other people—employs artists. Like any other commercial undertaking, the question it ultimately asks is: “Will it pay?” From the factory (the studio) to the shop-counter (the box-office) this is the real preoccupation; and the millions queueing nightly from Barnstaple to Bogota, they are the people who decide.