What shall be done in especial by this generation of idealists, whose flags rise and go down, whose battle line wavers and breaks a thousand times?  What is the high quixotic splendid call?  We know of a group of public-spirited people who advocate, in endowed films, “safety first,” another that champions total abstinence.  Often their work seems lost in the mass of commercial production, but it is a good beginning.  Such citizens take an established studio for a specified time and at the end put on the market a production that backs up their particular idea.  There are certain terms between the owners of the film and the proprietors of the studio for the division of the income, the profits of the cult being spent on further propaganda.  The product need not necessarily be the type outlined in chapter two, The Photoplay of Action.  Often some other sort might establish the cause more deeply.  But most of the propaganda films are of the action variety, because of the dynamic character of the people who produce them.  Fired by fanatic zeal, the auto speeds faster, the rescuing hero runs harder, the stern policeman and sheriff become more jumpy, all that the audience may be converted.  Here if anywhere meditation on the actual resources of charm and force in the art is a fitting thing.  The crusader should realize that it is not a good Action Play nor even a good argument unless it is indeed the Winged Victory sort.  The gods are not always on the side of those who throw fits.

There is here appended a newspaper description of a crusading film, that, despite the implications of the notice, has many passages of charm.  It is two-thirds Action Photoplay, one-third Intimate-and-friendly.  The notice does not imply that at times the story takes pains to be gentle.  This bit of writing is all too typical of film journalism.

“Not only as an argument for suffrage but as a play with a story, a punch, and a mission, ‘Your Girl and Mine’ is produced under the direction of the National Woman’s Suffrage Association at the Capitol to-day.

“Olive Wyndham forsook the legitimate stage for the time to pose as the heroine of the play.  Katherine Kaelred, leading lady of ’Joseph and his Brethren,’ took the part of a woman lawyer battling for the right.  Sydney Booth, of the ‘Yellow Ticket’ company posed as the hero of the experiment.  John Charles and Katharine Henry played the villain and the honest working girl.  About three hundred secondaries were engaged along with the principals.

“It is melodrama of the most thrilling sort, in spite of the fact that there is a moral concealed in the very title of the play.  But who is worried by a moral in a play which has an exciting hand-to-hand fight between a man and a woman in one of the earliest acts, when the quick march of events ranges from a wedding to a murder and an automobile abduction scene that breaks all former speed-records.  ‘The Cause’ comes in most symbolically and poetically, a symbolic figure that ‘fades out’ at critical periods in the plot.  Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, the famous suffrage leader, appears personally in the film.