The Menace of the Movie

Excerpt from: Do Your Children Play—or Go to the Movies?
James J. Walsh and John A. Foote
The Ladies Home Journal 41 (February, 1924) 40

Listen to the authors’ disdain for movie spectatorship by children because they do not get enough proper exercise.

In our day there is a distinct tendency for city children to get no inconsiderable part of their recreation in attendance at the moving-picture theaters. This represents an unfortunate development in social life, for the children who go to the movies in the afternoon have been in class for some five hours, sitting down most of the time, have had very little muscle exercise, and now sit down in cramped positions in a stuffy moving-picture theater for several hours more. These two occupations consume all the daylight hours, so that there is almost no chance for recreation in the open air on such a day. On Saturdays and Sundays, the afternoons at least used to be given almost completely by school children to exercise in the open, and usually to healthy sport, and the forgetfulness of self that comes in the midst of games. Now for a great many, one at least and sometimes both of these afternoons are spent in the motion-picture theater.

Professor Patrick, of the Iowa State University, has discussed the problems of the attendance of children at the movies in a very suggestive way. He says: “As regards the movies, one point in their favors has been noted. They are accessible and available. They satisfy vicariously the love of adventure, the roaming instinct, the delight in the new and the strange and the wonderful. They are absorbing, diverting the weary souls from its troubles. They relieve the strain upon the will by the plot interest, which carries the observer along without effort. They bring a glimpse of fairyland into some lives that are drab and prosy. Those who cannot even dance may here participate in the sight of dancing. To those who have no beauty in their daily surroundings, beauty if brought in many forms upon the screen.”