Minor Matters

Many an adult New Yorker remembers when he used to stand on tiptoe so as to look tall when buying tickets to the movies, lie to suspicious doormen who asked: "Are you over 16?" New York City fortnight ago lifted the ban which prohibited children under 16 from entering cinemansions unless accompanied by adults. Last week theatre-owners there were busy arranging machinery to comply with a new law whereby most peewees can hereafter attend cinemansions without subterfuge.

Originally designed to keep minors out of saloons, and extended to cinema theatres when these were mostly nickelodeons, the purpose of the New York law was less to prevent children from seeing movies that might damage their morals, than to keep them out of reach of the pickpockets, kidnappers and perverts supposed to be lurking in dark theatres. As cinemansions improved, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children campaigned to retain the law on the ground that moving pictures might give children bad ideas. Hereafter, to theatres which pay $10 for the privilege of having them, children may go, unaccompanied by adults, up to 6 p. m. during school months, up to 7 p. m. in the summer. Ushers will direct them to a special section near the screen where children, unlike adults, prefer to sit. A qualified matron, licensed by the city, will see to it that they sit in their own section, behave properly while there.

Adequately designed to protect children from bad adults, the law contains no teeth to protect children from each other, provides no check on the degree of sophistication permissible to picayune cinemaddicts, still encourages lying. If a 5-year-old cinemaddict who has been waiting eagerly to see Jean Harlow in Suzy presents himself at a New York cinemansion box-office when that film is released next week, he may well be refused admittance unless he says he is over 6.

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