ABSTRACT
The worst of Mr Rotha, as of all highbrow writers about the cinema, is that he will not recognise what I should like to call the half-way film … I am persuaded that what the average intelligent cinema-goer likes is something half-way between the Caligari stuff, in which people look like parallelograms and furniture in rhomboid, and the nit-wit film in which stenographers renounce diamonds and protection for the horny-handed wistfulness of some virginal cow-puncher. Most cinema-goers I am persuaded, just want a reasonably good story reasonably well told.
