[Illustration: _Courtesy Universal Pictures Corporation._ GETTING THRILLS WITH A BALLOON. Motion-picture camera men circle the globe, and companies go almost any distance for a novel location or sensation. Note the carefully assembled “properties” apparently carelessly strewn on the ground beside the basket.] [Illustration: _Courtesy W. W. Hodkinson Corporation._ AN OLD WHALING SHIP REFITTED TO MAKE A NEW MOVIE. The _George W. Morgan_, nearly 100 years old, refitted and sent to sea to make a whaling story called “Down to the Sea in Ships.”] On the other hand, in contrast to these hurriedly made, inaccurate pictures, made to make money for ignorant people by entertaining still more ignorant people, are the really worth while historical films and others made with painstaking care. Some of the great American directors maintain entire departments for research work, that check up on the accuracy of each detail before it goes into production, costumes are verified, past or present, details of architecture are reproduced from actual photographs, and even incidents of history and the appearance of historic individuals are treated with scrupulous accuracy. Valuable impressions of life in ancient Babylon could be gathered from Griffith’s great picture “Intolerance.” While not necessarily accurate in every detail, the wonderful Douglas Fairbanks films “Robin Hood” and “The Three Musketeers” instruct as well as entertain. In a magnificent series of historic spectacle films such as “Peter The Great,” “Passion,” and “Deception,” the Germans have set a high-water mark of film production that combines dramatic entertainment with semi-historical setting. It seems a pity after watching one of the really well-made historical photoplays, to have to see a picture of the American Revolution so carelessly made, in spite of its cost of nearly $200,000, that you feel sorry for the poor British redcoats at the battle of Concord, when the American minute men, outnumbering them about ten to one, fire on them at close range from behind every stone wall and tree or hummock big enough to conceal a rabbit. Why, according to that particular director’s conception of the British retreat from Lexington, the patriots might just as well have stepped out from behind their protecting tree-trunks and put the entire English army out of its misery by clubbing it to death in three minutes. Leaving dramatic photoplays, then, let us turn to the other kind of movie that shows what actually happens. The news reels are the simplest form of this kind of movie. They correspond to the headlines in the daily newspapers, or newspaper illustrations. Indeed, a good many newspaper illustrations, nowadays, are merely enlargements made from single exposures, or “clippings,” from the news reels. You may yourself have noticed pictures in the rotogravure sections of Sunday newspapers that show the same scenes you have already seen in motion in the news reels during the week.