British Industry’s Shattered

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 388, 23 June 1928, Page 25

British Industry’s Shattered

F ortunes Wide Awake America REVOLT AGAINST HOLLYWOOD - r I7VEN if there were no ] Films Bill and no at- j tempt to rebuild the shat- I tered fortunes of the British I film industry, I think that J the revolt against Hollywood | i would have sprung up sooner j I or later. Look at the situa- j | tion, says a writer in an I ! English exchange.

American films had knocked out the Germans and the Swedes; the British, the French, and the Italians had never been serious competitors in the world market. A prostrate world acknowledged the supremacy of the great men of Los Angeles. But it was just in the completeness of their victory that the seeds of revolt lay. You see, the Americans do not understand that making films is not quite the same thing as making Ford cars. “It is a business like any other business,” they say, perhaps because they feel it is more respectable to be associated with commerce than with that vagabond thing, art. And so they overlooked the one thing which is as certain about films as about every other art, namely, that it lives by variety and change and dies under mass production. Boredom would have killed Hollywood by driving people away from picture theatres if Europe had not awakened to the necessity of infusing a new, or rather a different, spirit and outlook into the film-making industry. Awakened to Danger Now there are signs that Hollywood has awakened to her danger. The order has gone forth that films are to be made in which every care will be taken to give a definite national at-

mosphere, English, French, German or whatnot. No doubt it is as part of a scheme to convey the psychology ol Europe that such great European producers as Seastrom and Murnau, maker o£ the much-boomed “Sunrise,” have been imported by Hollywood. , I don’t think the deep-laid plan will succeed, but I am more concerned with the stupidity of British and, to a less extent, German producers who appear to bo doing their best to issue a series of more or Tess feeble imitations of the finished Hollywood That is the way to play into the hands of the Americans, who are not afraid of imitations that will only throw into stronger relief the supremacy of the American film in its own field, but who are afraid of anyone who can develop a definite national style of film. The only hope left to bored cinemagoers seems to be the very flimsy one that someone or other will allow us to see Russian films. Russia is the only country where American influences have not penetrated, but for some reason which I cannot even guess we are given no opportunity of seeing Russian films. Probably the film most worth seeing in London this week is the Casanova film (but you must not say “Casanova” above a whisper), “Prince of Adventurers” at the Rialto, and the Cherrv Keaton jungle film at the Stoll is just the sort of thing for this time of year. It Doesn’t Thrill The man who does not like a good crook play with plenty of mystery and thrill is a creature on whom we need not waste anything but pity. This makes it all the more necessary to warn the honest fellows who, like ourselves, have a soft side for shockers, when a bad crook- play makes its appearance. I feel, therefore, that I am doing a good turn to large and deserving sections of the public when I tell them that “The Black Spider’’ is, In my opinion, a bad crook play. It is bad because to anyone but a congenital idiot there is no mystery about the identity of the Black-Spider after the first three minutes, because ! even this poor secret, which is the sole excuse for the play, is given away before it is half over, and because the ingenuities of both criminals and detectives are childish in the extreme. I shall say nothing about the comic policeman. That was old when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an infant.