WHAT FILMS NEED

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21380, 24 June 1939, Page 16

WHAT FILMS NEED

British Viewpoint When people complain about the scarcity of good British pictures they mean, I suppose, that they would like to see more British pictures which are also good pictures, remarks an English writer. There is, however, another way of looking at it. It is reasonable, too, to want more good pictures which are also British, which use not the stock characters and plots of the cinema all over the world, but discover for us something of the esential character of the odd people among whom we live.

What delights us in a French picture is often its Frenchness. There, we say to ourselves affectionately, there they go again, isn’t that just like the French? And we remember a moustache exactly like that, under a hat exactly like that, scowling behind a copy of “Paris-Soir” and drinking a sirop on a corner of the Boulevard de Clichy. In the same way American films at their best have impressed themselves as American on the cinema public. The gunmen gliding silent and swift as sharks down the carpeted corridors, the truculent friendly taximen and barmen, the lightning-back-chat typists and telephone girls—it may all be a cinema convention, yet the films have convinced us that we are seeing something which belongs to one country and one only. But up to the present British films have not succeeded in conveying the individual flavour of life in this country.

The truth is that British films have not yet learned to use the genuine individual material which is waiting for them. French films, the best American films, are full of tiny character sketches which are not strictly essential to the story but which give solidity to it. The characters are there in England for anyone who chooses to present them: the sublimely insolent young lady in the Post Office, the saleswoman ogling the customer in the unbecoming frock (“simply too unique”), the taxi-driver examining his tip, the motorist and the bus-driver exchanging compliments in the traffic jam. And enormous tracts of English life have as yet hardly been touched by the film producers. The raffish life of the racecourse and the bleak community of the factory; the real music-hall, the real pub; greyhound racing, pigeon-racing, the whole world

of sport on which and for which a large section of the country lives—what films could be made of these!

The tempo of British regional or occupational films would probably differ from that of other countries. But there is no reason why a picture about coal-mining in England should not be as moving and as dramatic as the German “Kamaradschaft,” no reason why we should not rival the American “Dead End” with a Whitechapel “Dead End.” Perhaps some day we shall. In the meantime there are signs that English directors are becoming aware that their chance is not with “mighty” spectacles, but with films of wit, character and observation.