Our Boys and Girls

Which Cinemas They Like Best -- and Why

Have you an average high-school boy or girl in your home? If yon have, do you know that the boy goes to the movies 1.23 times a week--the girl 1.05 times per hebdomadary segment? Never suspected it, did you? That is to say, you may have known about the one time, but as for the decimal fractions--well, it's wonderful what those young people are able to put over on the oldsters!

At any rate, Mr. Clarence Arthur Perry, of the National Committee for Better Films, Russell Sage Foundation, now stands ready to give you the "lowdown" on just how the movies affect your growing family-- what they like and dislike on the silver screen, what effect, if any, it has on their adolescent minds, their own pet actors and actresses--statistics 'n all." In fact about the only thing he hasn't done to the unsuspecting high school pupils of 76 American cities and large towns is to lay them end to end.

For instance--the pictures high school boys like best rank as follows:

1) Western and frontier stories.

2) Comedies.

3) Detective stories.

4) Love stories.

Sherlock Holmes and his ilk rank Eros and Deadshot Dalton ranks the lot. The girls are more tender. Love stories are their first choice, comedies second, society life as known to the De Mille brothers third, and then come the Westerns. Serials, tragedies and stories " with sad endings " are out of favor with both sexes. And they just hate, or at least they say they do, the custard pie varieties of comedy, over-mushy yarns and films that are brutal or untrue to life.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse takes the blue ribbon with the boys as the best individual picture. The Sheik is the girls' prime favorite, The Four Horsemen running second. Four Griffith pictures are mentioned in the first twelve by both. The Three Musketeers draws a heavy vote from the boys, but doesn't rate so high with the girls. Too little love interest, perhaps.

As for favorite actors and actresses, Mary Pickford, Norma Talmadge, Constance Talmadge and Gloria Swanson gain the affections of both groups in that order. Then there is a difference of opinion. Douglas Fairbanks is, of course, the beau ideal of boyhood and Rodolph Mineralava Valentino, equally of course, the prince of girlish dreams.