The temper of the public mind is quite an important thing, for it is this elusive quality which makes or breaks governments and determines the characteristic spiritual color of a period. Many words have been wasted deciding just what this thing called public opinion is and how to find out where it is moving at any particular time--all to very little avail. Of recent years there has grown up an interesting barometer of opinion that, so far as I know, has attracted little attention. This is the common garden variety of movie, Genus Americans Ordinaris.

The American public wants to be amused 365 nights per year and, since there are not sufficient Mae Wests etc. to go around there must be a vast mass (or mess if you prefer) of plain movies. They tell a simple story: they point a simple moral; in short they provide an evening of passive satisfaction, of delicious mental abnegation. The box office receipts on these movies provide a vivid guide to the producer as to just what will satisfy the public at any given moment. What one finds in these productions gives an extraordinarily interesting and, I think, significant indication of what the public is thinking, for movies do not only detect the ideas of the public, but they also strongly accentuate already existing tendencies.

As the country drifts into its fourth year of depression, the public has taken seriously to wearing sackcloth and ashes. The current movies at the University Theatre indicate that this flagellation has become quite strong. In "The Power and the Glory" (showing today) we have the traditional American saga of the lowly working man rising from the ranks by diligence and effort to become President not only of one railroad but of many railroads. This has always been desirable, glorious, the aim of all true Americans. Yet in the movie it is analyzed closely to show that it is vicious, wicked, and ruinous to the happiness of the successful man. His life as a track walker was happy; his wife prodded him to ambition and success, which resulted only in unhappiness and suicide for both. This was not portrayed as a result of the characters of the two people, but as a result of their wealth, their success. The whole picture was full of revealed hypocrisy, of calculated greed and rottenness, of the iniquitous effect of wealth and Yale upon the second generation.

The same thing holds true of last week's offering "The World Changes." The pioneer mother warns her son that money only leads to ruin, not happiness, but he goes on with his cattle business, in which he rises to be the big Chicago packer. He lived to see his wealth make his wife hate him and go mad, turn his sons into rotten social parasites, who uniformly come to a bad end and produce more children who are well on their way to an equally bad end. This same doleful tale was told in "He Loved a Woman," which was at the University a few weeks ago. It was a fused picture of the Armour rise and collapse and the Insull flasco. Always there is painted with vivid morbidity the panorama of where wealth collects and men decay.

The importance of all this cannot be overemphasized. America has been an expanding, jubilant, barbarically confident country, with a whole untouched continent to exploit. In this milieu the dominant fact was economic growth and amassing of wealth. Naturally this became the American ideal, most blatantly expressed by the American Magazine (properly named, indeed.) The movies early responded to this and provided the delectable pleasures of Park Avenue, the European resorts, and all that goes with them under a rosy hue. It was all represented as a glorious Paradise right here on earth.

Now all is gone. To be poor is to be happy. To be secure is to have everything. Wealth and position are not to be desired. Happiness is a more elusive thing and may be found right in anyone's modest cottage on the edge of Middletown. How deeply this Philosophy penetrates, how permanent it will be, I do not guess. It does seem to be, however, a dominant note today. TERTIUS.