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Garth S. Jowett, Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller.
Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy Cambridge University Press. xxiii, 415. us $54.95
As the foreword to Children and the Movies reminds us, cultural policy disputes have only increased in intensity since the advent of the electronic media. When the Payne Fund Studies (hereafter PFS) were initiated in the late 1920s, film was the medium most likely to generate anxiety about the adverse effects of mass culture. Designed to gauge the response of young movie-goers to the cinema, the PFS also represented the first broad-based attempt to develop adequate social research models to measure the impact of the mass communication era's media. For these reasons, claim the authors of Children and the Movies, the PFS deserve special attention from film and mass communications scholars alike. But addressing the needs of these two scholarly communities proves to be nearly as difficult a project as that given to the original PFS researchers; despite providing a painstaking account of the genesis, preparation, and reception of the studies, buttressed by extensive archival research, Children and the Movies will likely fail to convince those unfamiliar with the...