Types of film
Answers to this question will vary widely according to the country concerned. For example romantic feature films seem to receive great popular support in India, and their stars are almost national heroes. This may be due to the lack of good, or indeed any television, combined with the instinct to escape from a deprived environment.
In the West the film has not been the major entertainment medium for over twenty years. Almost every home contains a television set and much of what is left of the British film industry is concerned with film-making for this medium. Film stars in the old sense no longer exist. The great days of Hollywood ended with the last war. No longer do families make a weekly outing to the cinema. Today there are less than twenty films showing in the West End of London. In the 30s any provincial town could offer more than this. Today most cinemas have long since become Bingo halls.
However the film industry, though small, is alive on both sides of the Atlantic, and when a good film is made there is still a following, and an excellent film can still make a lot of money. Another point in its favor is that the quality of television is deteriorating and seems likely to become atrocious when cable television is introduced. There will be even more space for rubbish and repeats.
During the past twenty or so years much has changed in the taste of film goers. For one thing the cinema of today is the virtual monopoly of young people, unless a film such as ‘Gandhi’ with wide general appeal is put on. Deliberate attempts to entertain the teenager have produced many films with the accent on explicit sex and violence, though more recently such productions have moved into the ‘video nasty’ area. However the government is trying to prevent the sale of such cassettes for use in home television sets.
One ‘clean’ though juvenile taste which is fairly new is for space fiction films. ‘Star Wars’ and ‘E.T.’ are recent examples of overwhelmingly successful productions. ‘The Return of the Jedi’ is currently showing in London’s West End.
There is no doubt that current popular taste rejects films which set out to be amusing. The days of ‘Doctor in the House’, of situation comedies, of films built round ‘stand-up’ comics such as Arthur Askey, have gone forever. They now form part of the television menu as repeats.
