ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT American Imagination In Cinema

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31319, 15 March 1967, Page 17

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT American Imagination In Cinema

Until the post-war years, with a few minor reverses, the American film occupied, almost unchallenged, the screens of the world. American domination has been total, and It has been founded on the rock of solid achievement, writes a special correspondent of “The Times.” But today, the reduction in the number of films seems not merely a quantitative decline but to argue a corresponding bunkruptcy of ideas. The American imagination, after a long and glorious reign, has exhausted itself, and has nowhere to turn. The great themes and personalities of Hollywood history have been repeated so often, that nothing is left but cliche and echo. The cowboys and the sheriffs, the racketeers and the cops, the gold diggers and the show girls, the presidents and the truck drivers, in all their splendour and misery, no longer have the ascendancy. The direction has changed. The impulse is from Europe. Indeed, Hollywood travels to Europe in search of it, more frequently than ever. MATERIAL REUSED

American film makers were wont to say a few years ago, that they produced films in Europe to get the authentic background. But in practice, they simply created the illusion of novelty, without adding to the general stock of ideas. Hollywood turned, as it still does, to the big Western, the Bible story, the medieval epic, the war, the bedroom farce and the standard musical, while European countries were exploring the human predicament on their own ground and finding inspiration in contemporary themes and complexities.

It is true, of course, that there were examinations of private and public morality, such as “Peyton Place” and searchings of the American conscience such as “Anatomy of a Murder” or “Advise and Consent.” These were familiar material whipped up into a

new sensationalism or adapted from the best-seller list. They fitted well into the prefabricated image of what a successful film should be and with a hundred others were intended to offset the damage wrought by television and prove the cinema’s 100 per cent superiority. Hollywood's reaction to the post-war realists in Italy and the beginnings of the New Wave in France was to produce adaptations of Ten--1 nessee Williams, William (Faulkner, Stephen Crane, or I Scott Fitzgerald. Films as characteristic as “On the Waterfront” or “A Streetcar Named Desire” were landmarks, but they appeared more significant than they were because of the mass of indifferent and repetitious material behind them or the noise of censorship. That is not to deny their merits. They showed a mature imagination. Yet during the early 1950 s when the decline in the fortunes of the movies was becoming serious, Hollywood seemed convinced that wide screens with the old traditional pictures on them would do the trick. It never supposed a more drastic remedy was needed to offset what was really a spiritual malaise and that this might be found in a greater intellectual daring.

NO ESSENTIAL CHANGE This was scarcely surprising, for the American cinema has seldom had the courage to confront vital issues, to explore things to an end, to project inconvenient truths, or if so it has usually been under cover of the established American playwrights I have noted, who had already faced the music on the stage and brought a certificate of respectability with them.

Hollywood film men looked with admiration at the postwar productions of a de Sica or a Rossellini in Italy or of a Renoir or a Clouzot in France, but this was the gesture of one professional man to another; it did not imply any commitment to the European idea or the harsh social truths that made it interesting. Occasionally,

when a Fellini or an Antonioni arrived, a few I technical tricks were taken ! over. What the American imagination lacked it imported ready-made in a stream of Continental productions, some of them admirable, some of them indifferent or palpably bad. But no change of heart or mind occurred. Foreign directors and stars, of course, have always given a flavour, a style, a distinction to the American cinema but have never been permitted to transform it wholly with their spirit, only with the ingredients which go to the making of a success. When Hollywood began a series of pictures in England in the 1950 s they skimmed the surface of English life but did not go into it. It is surely significant that a film like “Dr. Zhivago,” though made by an English director and written by an

English author, shows little sign of this contribution through the all-American texture.

In short, American films are still sustained by the same kind of imagination that has sustained them for half a century or more, a concern with the superficial. Even now, after wars and revolutions and flights into space, the themes are the same, the faces move in and out of the same drama, the farces occur in the same bedrooms, the guns are pointed in the same direction towards the same people, who die promptly. All this was once new. CONCERN WITH EXTERNAL When the Narrator in Marcel Proust’s novel visited Elstir in his studio it appeared to him as “the laboratory of a sort of new creation of the world,” and that is what

the American film has always been, America renewed every afternoon. It is hardly surprising that, after several decades, this kind of entertainment is beginning to look a bit worn round the edges and that producers have run out of inspiration. Perhaps the imagination behind Hollywood has been too often concerned with the physical, so that it produces only a continuous performance of outward and visible signs.

Henry James, Hemingway, Steinbeck have been easily fitted into this formula, and Scott Fitzgerald has been celebrated as an author who drank too much and came a cropper.

The adventures of the mind, the conflicts of society, have still to be thoroughly explored. Man cannot live in Disneyland alone.