All Pals Together: The Story of Children's Cinema (review)

Terry Staples. All Pals Together: The Story of Children's Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997.

This is an interesting and unusual book, detailing a relatively unknown though culturally significant phenomenon. Also, for the student of chil- dren's literature--a much better documented area--there are many informative parallels. Finally, and more idiosyncratically, it shows how compulsive and eccentric many of our interests can seem to outsiders. In the U.K., the term anorak or train-spotter--the equivalent of nerd--is often used for such introverted interests. However, though such people are often advised to "Get a life," when it comes to social history, the obsessive collectors and enthusiasts are the key to preserving significant areas of rich cultural heritage. Terry Staples, besides being a scholar, is such an enthusiast and draws on the fascinating memories of like-minded individuals.

I don't know whether "children's cinema"--generally a Saturday morning or matinee phenomenon--is peculiar to the U.K., but it is certainly something to which most British people over the age of thirty can relate, either because they themselves regularly attended or, conversely, were forbidden to attend such events. I have to say that Saturday morning cinema always had a tantalizing allure for me precisely because I did not go regularly. Although never explicitly stated by my parents, they clearly frowned upon it; so it was only on special occasions, at holiday times and such, that I managed to go along and enjoy this collective experience of being, in one of the Saturday club songs, "all pals together."

Staples expertly charts the development of the form, which goes back to 1900, and his opening sentences show a keen awareness of the key issues:

Four major themes dominate the story of children and cinema: exploitation, corruption, edification and diversion. Since the invention of the medium, people have variously tried to make money out of children, to protect them from moral and physical harm, to inject uplift into their experience or to entertain them on their own terms. (1)

This captures the essence of most concerns about children and the media. As with children's reading--whether chapbooks, penny dreadfuls, comics, point-horror, television, video, computer games, or the Internet--so cinema has also experienced its fair share of moral panic, going back to early concerns about hygiene, eyesight, and safety. And, as Staples records, not all these fears were unfounded. In the early years especially, with children packed into the cinemas like sardines, there were several serious accidents, the worst being at Paisley in Scotland in 1929, where seventy children were crushed and suffocated after an unfounded panic about fire.

There were also concerns about the morality of what was being viewed. One thinks of Neil Postman's thesis about the "disappearance of childhood," caused by instant access to a pictorial world, unlike the long apprenticeship of print. These concerns are varied, from racist pronouncements like Walsall Council's 1910 objection to a screening of an American boxing match in which a black man (Jack Johnson) defeats a white man (Jim Jeffries), because it "tended to demoralize and brutalize the minds of young people especially" (10), to more general concerns about violence and romance on the screen. As with any area involving children, adults' insecure reasoning belies their inability to conceptualize children adequately. One film, Balaclava, about the charge of the Light Brigade, was so thoroughly enjoyed by its audience that it led to one confused adult commenting: "The children shouted and cheered. It is . . . far too exciting for children"! (31)

Furthermore, there is an abiding concern about the amount of American material shown: Charlie Chaplin, Tom Mix, Rin Tin Tin, Hopalong Cassidy, Flash Gordon, Roy Rogers, and a host of other names that will ring nostalgic bells for many. The irony, of course, is that these are the highlights mentioned by a great number of those whose reminiscences of...