"Look, look!" we cried to each other. " Why, this one here, with the light hat and fashionable narrow ribbon, surely we have seen him somewhere. It is impossible to forget those impudent eyes! Where, then, did we meet him ?"

But after the man with the impudent eyes came hundreds of others— old men who looked like composers but who whistled falsely the fashionable song " Cheek to Cheek" from the picture Top Hat, and old men who looked like bankers but who dressed like small bank depositors, and young men in the most ordinary leather jackets who reminded us of gangsters. Only the girls were, on the whole, all of one face and that face tormented us, was unpleasantly familiar, just as equally familiar were the physiognomies of young men with gangster features and of respectable old men who were either bankers or composers or God only knows what. Finally, it became unendurable. It was only when we realized that we had seen all these people in motion pictures, that all of them were actors or dumb performers, of the second- and third-rate people. They were not so famous that we could remember their faces and names, but at the same time in our memory was embedded a dim recollection of them.

Where had we seen this handsome fellow with the Mexican sideburns? It may have been in a picture called Be Mine Alone, or maybe it was in the musical Meet Me at Midnight.

Drug-stores in Hollywood are sumptuous. Nickel-plated and glassed, provided with a well-trained personnel in white jackets with chevrons, these establishments have attained such operating perfection that they remind one rather of the machine rooms of electrical stations. This impression was aided by the hissing of taps, the light thunder of little motors that whip malted milk, and the metallic taste of sandwiches.

Over the city shone a strong Christmas sun. Solid black shadows fell on the asphalt ground. There is something unpleasant about the climate of Hollywood. There is nothing sunny in the sun. It resembles a hot moon, although it warms very strongly. In the air one senses constantly a kind of sickish dryness, while the odour of worked-over petrol which permeates the city is unendurable.

We passed under the street lamps on which were placed artificial cardboard firs with electric candles. This decoration was made by the merchants on the occasion of the approaching Christmas. Christmas in America is a great and bright holiday of commerce which has no connection whatever-with religion. It is a grandiose clearance sale of all the old merchandise, so that, with all our lack of love for God, we cannot indict Him for participating in this unsavoury business.

But before telling about God, about trade, and Hollywood life, we must say a few things, first of all, about American motion pictures. It is an important and interesting subject.

We, Moscow theatre patrons, are somewhat spoiled by American cinematography. That which reaches Moscow and is shown to a small number of cinema specialists at nightly previews is almost always the best that Hollywood creates.

Moscow has seen the pictures of Lewis Milestone, King Vidor, Reuben Mamoulian, and John Ford: cinematographic Moscow has seen the best pictures of the best directors. Moscow theatre audiences have admired the little pigs, the penguins, and the Disney mouse, and were delighted with the masterpieces of Chaplin. These directors, with the exception of Chaplin who releases one picture in several years, make five, eight, ten pictures a year. But, as we already know, Americans "shoot" eight hundred pictures a year. Of course, we naturally suspected that the remaining seven hundred and ninety pictures were not anything to write home about. But we had seen only good pictures and we had only heard about the bad ones. All the more depressing, therefore, was the impression American cinematography left with us after we became acquainted with it in its own native land.

In New York we went to motion-picture theatres almost every evening. On the way to California, stopping in large and small towns, we visited motion-picture theatres not almost every evening, but simply every evening. Usually two feature pictures are shown during one performance, in addition to a short comedy, an animated cartoon, and several newsreels, all taken by different motion-picture companies. Thus, we must have seen more than a hundred feature pictures alone.

All these pictures are below the level of human dignity. It seems to us that it is degrading for a human being to look at such pictures. They are designed for birds' brains, for slow-thinking human cattle of camel-like lack of fastidiousness. A camel can do without water for a week, and a certain kind of American motion-picture spectator can look at senseless pictures for twenty years on end. Every evening we would enter a motion-picture theatre with a vestige of hope and departed with the feeling of having eaten in all its details the famous lunch No. 2, of which we were duly sick and tired. However, the spectators, the most ordinary American garage mechanics, salesgirls, storekeepers, liked these pictures. At first we wondered about it, later we were worried about it, and then we began to understand how it all came about.

Those eight or ten pictures which are nevertheless good we never managed to see even once throughout the three months of visiting motion-picture theatres. Good pictures were shown to us in Hollywood by the directors themselves, who selected several out of hundreds of films made in the course of several years.

There are four main standard types of pictures: musical comedy, historical drama, a film of bandit life, and a film featuring some famous opera singer. Each of these standard types has only one plot, which is varied endlessly and tiringly. American spectators see one and the same thing year in and year out. They have become so accustomed to it that if they were presented with a picture that had a new plot they would undoubtedly burst into tears, like the child from whom his favourite toy had been taken, though it was old and broken.

The plot of a musical comedy consists of a poor but beautiful girl becoming the star of a variety show. On the way she falls in love with the director of the variety show (a handsome young man). The plot is, after all, not so simple. The point is that the director is in the clutches of another dancer, also beautiful and long-legged, but with a disgusting character. Thus, a measure of drama or conflict is indicated. There are, of course, also other variants. Instead of the poor girl, a poor young man, a kind of ugly duckling, becomes a star. He performs with his comrades; together all of them constitute a jazz band. It happens also that the stars are at the same time both the young girl and the young man. Naturally, they love each other. However, their love takes only one-fifth of the picture, the other four-fifths being devoted to the variety show. In the course of an hour and a half bare legs flash by and the gay theme of the song which is compulsory on such occasions is heard. When a lot of money is spent on a film, then the best legs in the world are shown to the spectators. When the film is cheaper, the legs are a little worse, not so long and not so beautiful. That has nothing to do with the plot. In either case, the plot has not yet startled anyone with the sheer complexity of its inventiveness. The plot is unravelled like a tap-dance number. The public dotes on tap-dance plays. They are box-office successes.

In historical drama the events are of various kinds, depending on who is the principal character of the drama. They are divided into two categories : ancient Greek or Roman, and the more contemporary Musketeer plays. When the cock-o'-the-walk in the picture is Julius Caesar or, let us say, Numa Pompilius, then Greek or Roman fibre-made accoutrements are brought out into the light of day, and the young men whom we saw on the streets of Hollywood "hack" each other frantically with wooden poleaxes and swords. When the main acting person is Catherine the Second or Marie Antoinette or some long lanky Englishwoman of royal blood, then that is already in the Musketeer category—that is, there will be waving of hats and sweeping of floors with ostrich feathers, countless duelling without any particular warrant for it, pursuits and hunts on fat-rumped little racing horses, also a grandiose platonic and boresome connection between the young impoverished nobleman and the empress or queen, accompanied with strictly timed kisses (the Hollywood censorship permits only kisses of a definite film length). The plot of such a play is whatever God sends. If God sends nothing, the play goes on without a plot. The plot is not important. Important are duels, executions, feasts, and battles.