And so I return to my opening sentence: that though I do not know what is the official highbrow attitude towards the cinema, I should, if I had to define it in a hundred words for a symposium, write something like this. “The highbrow professes to despise the American sobstuff drama: he objects to the conversion into films of plays and novels. He searches in classical presentations for anachronisms and historical blunders. He enjoys, however, the gymnastics of Douglas Fairbanks, the knockabout comedies, Charlie Chaplin and the Pathé Gazette.” And were my opinion to be invited further, I should pronounce myself to be in complete disagreement with this attitude. I enjoy American sobstuff; I feel the right emotions at the right moment. I pray that the misunderstanding between the hero and the heroine may be speedily and effectively removed. It is with extreme difficulty that I restrain myself from rising in my seat to explain to the young ass that the affluent and middle-aged person with whom he saw her at the opera was in fact her uncle. In these days of infinite compression it is not unpleasant to have told one in eighty minutes a story that it would take a day and a half to read, and told on the whole, I find, more entertainingly than in a full-length novel. There are no psychological or sociological interludes; one gets on with the business. Indeed, for ninety-nine per cent. of the long films that are put upon the market, I am, I take it, the sort of person the producer has in mind when he produces them. As the dramatic critic says, “For those that like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.” But by the short, one-reel affairs I am, I confess, unmoved. It does not amuse me to see the Duke of York inspect Boy Scouts at Northampton, nor am I anxious to learn by what process sardines are transferred from the Atlantic to the breakfast table. Films that are described as “interest” weary me. Nor can I believe that Larry Semon is a comedy king. Rarely can a civilised people have allowed itself to be entertained by more primitive, less subtle humour. It is entirely of the “top-hat-on-the-chair” variety, and it ends like the Harlequinade, in a chase. There is, however, one trick in the comedy film which always gets me; the trick of making you, by a reversion of the film and turning of the handle backwards, see an aged and effete man do a standing, backward, fifteen-foot jump on to the top of a narrow wall. You see a plate that has been smashed to atoms recollect itself and become whole. You see milk that has been spilt return to the pitcher. A couple of ruffians have reduced a room in three minutes to utter ruin; the handle is turned and the room restores itself. A miracle, you say. For, although you know perfectly well that it is a trick, you cannot help for the moment being swept into credulence. After all, there, before your eyes, the thing is happening.