Strong People?

"Healthy Youth—Strong People" was the title written on the Physics room board for us; but the actual title and preliminary explanation were in German, the name of Adolf Hitler being prominent. It appeared to be a review of the methods being used in Germany to-day to ensure that the youth of the country is physically fit. We saw babies swimming, children running through forests, sliding down chutes, balancing on boards, performing intricate evolutions on gymnastic apparatus. We saw sylph-like Nordic lasses doing dances 'nenth the light of the moon, and looking for all the world like the mermaids in "Peccadillo" or the ladies of Hades in "The Plutocrats." We saw demonstrations of physical strength, and remarkable displays on parallel bars.

But we also saw boys clambering through ropes twisted to represent barbed wire entanglements, and leaping out or earth trenches with long sticks in their hands. . . .

The film culminated in a huge physical culture display—thousands upon thousands of young men and women in a great arena—so great that when they moved in unison it looked from above like the wind passing over a field of corn.

And when we saw the girls dancing, we remembered Hitler's statement: "In the education of women emphasis must be laid primarily on physical development. Only afterwards must consideration he given to spiritual values, and lastly to mental development. Motherhood is undeniably the aim of feminine education."

And when we saw the boys leaping "over the top" we thought of Hitler's words in "Mein Kampf": "An alliance whose aim does not Include the Intention of war is worthless nonsense."

As "Salient's" companion said: "If only that were an end in itself instead of a mean to an end!"

"The Development of the Thistle" was the title or the next film. It may sound trite to say that we learned that there was romance and beauty even in a common thistle, but this was exactly the effect of this magnificent film. Pollination, germination, the spreading of the seed, and the subsequent growth were dealt with artistically, a specially brilliant piece of photography being a sequence showing the thistle actually growing from the seed to about half its usual height.