Who, What and How

When Margaret Farrand Thorp heard that 85,000,000 persons buy admissions every week to 17,000 movie houses in 9,000 U. S. towns & villages, she decided to find out why. She also wanted to know who the 85,000,000 are, what movies do to them and how they do it. Recently Author Thorp published her findings. Though she modestly says that any such book as hers (America at the Movies, Yale University Press; $2.75) must be "inadequate," "inaccurate," "written rapidly and superficially," to many a reader it may seem crisp, witty, just--a comprehensive roundup of candid facts about people who make, act in and look at movies.

The customer Hollywood tries hardest to please, according to Author Thorp, is the wife of a man earning more than $1,500, living in a city of more than 50,000 people. Her husband is the movies' average man and from his pockets comes more than half of Hollywood's yearly revenues. To his average wife Hollywood sells dreams of luxury and love more expertly unreal than her own imagination, experience and daring could ever make them. "What the adult American female chiefly asks of the movies is the opportunity to escape by reverie from an existence which she finds insufficiently interesting. . . . She sees the quickest release... in dreaming of an existence which is rich, romantic, glamorous. But dreaming, though a pleasant occupation, is not altogether easy. . . . The making of a really good reverie demands considerable effort of energy and imagination. How," asks the author, ''can the American woman who buys her bread sliced and her peas shelled be expected to concoct her own reveries?" The best parts of the book report how Hollywood concocts them for her.

In part, Author Thorp thinks, the result is educational. "The new rich . . . wanted to know all about high-powered cars, airplanes, ocean liners, yachts, villas, exotic food, wine, jewels, Paris dresses, perfect servants; and De Mille told them."

Author Thorp's funniest and most tactful chapter deals with reform in the movies and such organizations as the League of Decency, the Hays office, the State boards of censorship. Censors in Virginia, she finds, are most concerned about sex; in New York with political corruption; in Kansas with drinking, nose thumbing. She admires the versatility with which censors safeguard U. S. morals. Sample: when the script for Zaza called for a female character to shout at an admirer, "Pig! Pig! Pig!" the vigilant Hays office ordered: "Delete two pigs."

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