These shows work like the express elevators in the Metropolitan Tower.  The ideal is the maximum of speed in descending or ascending, not to be jolted into insensibility.  There are two girl parts as beautifully thought out as the parts of ladies in love can be expected to be in Action Films.  But in the end the love is not much more romantic in the eye of the spectator than it would be to behold a man on a motorcycle with the girl of his choice riding on the same machine behind him.  And the highest type of Action Picture romance is not attained by having Juliet triumph over the motorcycle handicap.  It is not achieved by weaving in a Sherlock Holmes plot.  Action Picture romance comes when each hurdle is a tableau, when there is indeed an art-gallery-beauty in each one of these swift glimpses:  when it is a race, but with a proper and golden-linked grace from action to action, and the goal is the most beautiful glimpse in the whole reel.

In the Action Picture there is no adequate means for the development of any full grown personal passion.  The distinguished character-study that makes genuine the personal emotions in the legitimate drama, has no chance.  People are but types, swiftly moved chessmen.  More elaborate discourse on this subject may be found in chapter twelve on the differences between the films and the stage.  But here, briefly:  the Action Pictures are falsely advertised as having heart-interest, or abounding in tragedy.  But though the actors glower and wrestle and even if they are the most skilful lambasters in the profession, the audience gossips and chews gum.

Why does the audience keep coming to this type of photoplay if neither lust, love, hate, nor hunger is adequately conveyed?  Simply because such 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