spectacles gratify the incipient or rampant speed-mania in every
American.

To make the elevator go faster than the one in the Metropolitan Tower is
to destroy even this emotion. To elaborate unduly any of the agonies or
seductions in the hope of arousing lust, love, hate, or hunger, is to
produce on the screen a series of misplaced figures of the order
Frankenstein.

How often we have been horrified by these galvanized and ogling corpses.
These are the things that cause the outcry for more censors. It is not
that our moral codes are insulted, but what is far worse, our nervous
systems are temporarily racked to pieces. These wriggling half-dead men,
these over-bloody burglars, are public nuisances, no worse and no better
than dead cats being hurled about by street urchins.

The cry for more censors is but the cry for the man with the broom.
Sometimes it is a matter as simple as when a child is scratching with a
pin on a slate. While one would not have the child locked up by the chief
of police, after five minutes of it almost every one wants to smack him
till his little jaws ache. It is the very cold-bloodedness of the
proceeding that ruins our kindness of heart. And the best Action Film is
impersonal and unsympathetic even if it has no scratching pins. Because
it is cold-blooded it must take extra pains to be tactful. Cold-blooded
means that the hero as we see him on the screen is a variety of amiable
or violent ghost. Nothing makes his lack of human charm plainer than when
we as audience enter the theatre at the middle of what purports to be the
most passionate of scenes when the goal of the chase is unknown to us and
the alleged "situation" appeals on its magnetic merits. Here is neither
the psychic telepathy of Forbes Robertson's Cæsar, nor the fire-breath of