Cinematic Soapboxing

George Thomas Cummins, cockney moviemaker of London has found that the old socialist sidewalk technique is sound business--the way to get an audience is to jump on a soapbox and raise your voice. The Cummins soapbox is British Paramount News,* makers of news shorts, which Cummins organized in 1931, and of which he is director and editor.

Typical British Paramount product is the recently released ten-minute news review of 1941, in which a blistering backward glance at some recent British historical weaknesses and blunders turns into a rousing shout for a new order. Says Cummins' commentator John Stagg, to shots of Chungking bombings: "We know that Chungking has been bombed hundreds of times, for lack of the defending planes we might easily have spared. To purchase a few months' respite, we even descended to the final ignominy of closing the last avenue to China--the Burma Road. . . . The old economic system must go!"

The villain of the Cummins' news shorts is conservatism. But, like a good propagandist, Cummins sometimes varies his fare with shorts like the one on the homecoming of Hitler-loving Unity Freeman-Mitford (TiME, Jan. 15, 1940). The short was narrated in smooth doggerel,/- accompanying shots of British troops keeping the press at bay with fixed bayonets.

Whatever British cinemaudiences may think of Director Cummins' editorial viewpoint, bursts of applause, snorts of approval, murmurs of "Good show!" (the British equivalent of a rebel yell), indicate that they like his shorts.

* Subsidiary of American Paramount (through Britain's Olympic Cine-Laboratories), which exercises only fiscal control.

/- Sample: "Unity thought the Fuehrer The greatest man on earth So did a lot of folks high up, For what their views were worth. Not that we mention any names, Or we might get it hot. But now that Unity is back Our comment is, So what?" Refrain: ''For Redesdale's daughter, Unity, Has quit the Fatherland And now with us consents to dwell. Where is our best prize band?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.