Are the Foreign Films Better?

by GILBERT SELDES

1

AFTER a long period of steadily declining revenue, the movie industry recently took stock of itself and the result appeared in the usual succinct form of a headline in Variety: —

“More Adult” Pix Key to Top Coin.

The allusion was to a series of addresses delivered by Erie Johnston to his clients, the largest studios in Hollywood, in which he said that “America is growing up and films must catch up with that ‘phenomenon.’” He noted that since 1929 the enrollment in high schools has doubled, and argued that the lost box-office appeal has been due, in part, to “the failure of film content to keep up with his change.”

There were dissenting voices. Jack Warner, soberly comparing the gross receipts of The Treasure of Sierra Madre ($1,500,000) and a Betty Grable picture ($3,500,000), announced that art was out. A survey of independent managers of movie houses, most of them outside the big cities, came to the conclusion that the Hollywood studios were making too many pictures “to please the sophisticates along Broadway and the professional movie critics,”and warned the producers that if this continued, the movies would become a class entertainment, their place for the masses being taken by “some other forms.”(Television?)

Statistics were on Mr. Johnston’s side. At the time of his talks, the nine most profitable pictures included three that were definitely aimed at intelligent adult audiences (Hamlet, The Red Shoes, The Snake Pit), and three others (Joan of Arc, A Letter to Three Wives, Command Decision) were far out of the ruck of violence and sentimentality. The other three, run-of-studio products, were a spectacular sea picture, an Errol Flynn movie, and Whispering Smith with Alan Ladd. A typical Hollywood product, Secret Beyond the Door, lost $1,100,000, whereas All My Sons, a prestige picture based on a play by Arthur Miller, foreshadowing the somber temper of his Death of a Salesman, lost only a small sum. (Data from the invaluable Variety.)

These figures are not conclusive. But the appearance of serious and tragic pictures, whether American or British, in the list of top attractions is a new factor in the calculations of the bankers who finance the studios and who have learned that the average Hollywood picture is not drawing sufficient audiences to pay its way. Even in the peak year of 1946, only one Hollywood picture in ten paid for itself out of U.S. rentals alone, and the decline in business since has been marked. (The most optimistic figure is 8 per cent, which Variety corrects to something nearer a decline of 15 percent.)

While this has been going on, Hollywood has discovered that some of its taboos can be brushed aside profitably. Pictures about anti-Semitism have been well received and the next step has been taken: at least three pictures dealing seriously with the Negro problem will be issued this season. Since the stereotyped formula seems to have failed, Hollywood is obviously preparing for a cycle of “mature" pictures.

In a resentful way, studio executives have defined a mature picture as one made in England “which if we made it no one would pay any attention to it.”It signifies to them drab characters in actual or realistic settings, talky arguments about economics, sympathy for the poor, and, above all, an unhappy ending. It is a picture made for showing at small outlying houses, not in the big theater-chains, a picture without famous stars, produced on a small budget, which cannot pay off its investment until it has been in circulation a long time. Hollywood prefers to pay off its loans OUT of the early runs.

This jumble of economic and aesthetic criteria of maturity is charged with the mixed emotions of producers whose security has been threatened and who have always envied the ease with which British pictures have made money here in spite of their artistic merit. The core of fact is that the best British pictures — the ones we see here — begin with material Hollywood does not habitually choose, they are made in a way Hollywood will seldom permit, and they require special exploitation to which the Hollywood system of releases is not adapted. In some ways the last of these, the economic difficulty, is the decisive factor.

In America a picture must be distributed before it is made. Without a guarantee of distribution at first-run houses (virtually indispensable for a wide release afterward) no agent will let his top star sign a contract, no bank will lend money, no picture will be made. The exceptions are negligible in number, if not in quality. Producers and patrons alike are accustomed to runs of about four weeks in the metropolitan palaces which function as showcases, after which comes simultaneous exhibition at perhaps twenty neighborhood houses, for three days or a week, and then shorter runs in towns and villages. Omitting the exceptional (mature) pictures listed above, only one picture in Boston and one in New York had played over three weeks in a first-run house at the time this was written; Chicago and Los Angeles had none over two weeks.

The rate of turnover has a profound effect on the quality of the pictures. To pay their way at the Radio City Music Hall and comparable houses, films must have strong drawing power even before the reviews are published and even after bad notices appear; they must be responsive to vast advance publicity and this, in practice, usually means that they must be vehicles for stars with large and devoted followings.

Under this system, there is no time for a picture to build an audience. Considerable experience in England, and some in America, indicates thal even if a picture drops below the profit line in its tilth or sixth week, it can recover on the strength of word-of-mouth publicity, to run half a year. The American system, geared to rapid change, cannot wait for this to happen.

The five major studios, releasing pictures made by many independents as well as their own, are committed to the manufacture of average pictures for average runs. The releasing system is complex and firmly rooted, and each organization would have to set up a separate, in part competitive, unit to handle the kind of picture that requires long runs, at single theaters, without immediate distribution to the chains.

One British producer, the brilliant Filippo del Giudice (who was responsible for Hamlet, Henry V, In Which We Serve, Odd Man Out, and The Tawny Pipit among others) believes that British pictures should set up such a system for their “non-habit” films here, but doubts thal Americans can handle their own product in the same way. Although the number of special houses is growing impressively, they are not yet powerful enough to alter established merchandising habits. The dilemma of Hollywood, if it is to make mature pictures, is therefore serious; it cannot free itself from its system of distribution and it cannot force a different product into its present channels.

After distribution, the system of production has to be considered. In the best English studios, the executive-financial branch denies itself the right to interfere with production once the story is chosen and the talents of writers, directors, and players are engaged. In America the “front office” watches the daily rushes, makes changes during production, is free to order retakes, and generally is in a position of unchallenged final authority all through the weeks of actual shooting. It is impossible to give to any film the unity natural to those works of art which are the product of a single temperament, except in tin rare case of a Chaplin who is writer, producer, director, and star. The nearest thing to it is a harmonious combination of several talents, and this cannot function powerfully if each separate element can be set against the others and if all can be overruled by the financial interest.

2

THESE are the two prerequisites for the making of mature pictures: a distribution system that does not dictate production policy, and a system of production that encourages artistic talent to high creative effort, without interference. But it does not follow that equivalent conditions in America would necessarily produce pictures resembling the British product. The few admirable British films we have seen are chiefly useful to show us how hazardous a road Hollywood must travel on its way to maturity. For purposes of comparison I have chosen a British picture to which the adjective “mature” was invariably applied, although I have no special enthusiasm for it — Brief Encounter — and a remarkably good example of Hollywood at a high level, Double Indemnity, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The first is the story of a woman of the English middle class who accidentally meets a doctor in a near-by city and falls in love with him; of their restrained passion for one another and an interrupted assignation; of the heart broken decision the lovers make, the woman to return to her husband and family, the man to travel the conventional road of rejected British lovers, to Africa.

In the original half-hour play by Noel Coward, the entire action took place in the waiting room of a railway station, and in the picture the camera explored every platform and underpass as lovingly as a Hollywood cameraman traverses the dramatic splendors of California’s mountains and desert and sea. The setting was solidly situated in time and space; one felt the unseen presence of semaphores and ticket windows and baggage rooms in the background, so that the two or three people whose lives unfolded in each sequence were surrounded by the air we breathe, the feel of wood or stone or paving, the smells and sounds we know. The picture was done in gray, rather than black and white, as if to let the passion of the lovers glow more warmly against the drab walls that surrounded them.

In Double Indemnity also a man and a woman were caught in a frightening desire for each other; they made their plans in furtive meetings at a supermarket and we observed the workings of the fraudulent-claims department of an insurance company as background for the major action. Forbidden by current interpretations of the Production Code to say anything explicit about the sexual passion, Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, who made the picture, still managed to suggest that the passion existed. Here, too, the ending was “unhappy”; the lovers, after committing murder to be together, ended by shooting each other.

In all the techniques of picture making, Double Indemnity was superior to Brief Encounter (which committed the cardinal sin of having the woman narrator tell us what happened, using the past tense, while we saw the same events present before us). The small details of the American picture were fresh, some of the British were decidedly stale. Within the range of black and white, Double Indemnity had variety of tone; the cutting was effective, the minor characters expertly rendered, the use of sound admirable.

The important distinction between the two pictures was, however, all in favor of the less skillful one. Brief Encounter existed in the atmosphere of truth; in Double Indemnity everything was plausible, but the accent of truth was not heard. One was life-size, the scale right for human beings; the other was a succession of highlights, a brilliant and glossy projection, rather than a painting. The difference in key was audible in the voice levels, it was visible in make-up and dress, it was almost palpable in the highly charged sexual attraction communicated by Barbara Stanwyck compared with the calculated anti-glamor, the authentic comeliness of Celia Johnson. The people in Brief Encounter talked to one another, the people in Double Indemnity put over dialogue.

One of these pictures was a psychological drama, the other a melodrama of great violence, and the style of one would not be appropriate to the other. Both were, however, intended to give us the effect of being real; one achieved reality, the other only realism. It is not, of course, entirely accidental that the British treatment of an unsanctified love turned into a muted tragedy with sentimental overtones while the American developed into the violent death of the three principals; and it is also to be remarked that the essential qualities of these pictures recur in other types. Our comedies and our psychological pictures all have the high projection level of our melodrama, they are in the tempo of violence; and British melodrama usually has some of the interior quality of truth that marks Brief Encounter.

The best example of this is Odd Man Out, which was literally a cops-and-robbers picture. It began with a murder committed during a robbery and it ended, after a chase through a big city, with the police shooting the murderer; its contour, therefore, was precisely that of a thousand American pictures of which Naked City may be taken as above the average. Yet Naked City is entirely negligible — one remembers only some excellent shots of a chase through the superstructure of a bridge; and Odd Man Out haunts the memory not only in detail, but as a whole experience through which one has lived. The scene of the story is, presumably, Belfast, which I have never seen; it was more real to me than the familiar streets of New York where Naked City was filmed.

Max Lerner has said that “violence without meaning” is the dominant characteristic of our popular films. The peculiar merit of Odd Man Out is that while it was always a first-rate melodrama, attacking the surface nerves, it was not meaningless. The robbery and murder with which the story is launched are the consequences of high motives and the picture instantly engenders an emotion on which all the thrills are founded. We are familiar with sympathy for the hunted; here we suffer the unhappy conviction that evil deeds have risen out of noble passions, that “Life is that way” and we are helpless to change it.

The propagation of this sense is accomplished by many technical devices and it is so successful that it makes one forget the rigid scheme of the picture by which Art, Religion, Science, Greed, and Love are each personified, fighting for the soul of the man whose body the State is trying to capture. The underlying emotion is a counterpoint of gravity in the headlong action; it makes all the minor thrills more exciting; they have an inward connection, one with another. And the duration of the emotion, our enduring it over the whole night of the action (not the ninety minutes of the unrolling of the film), gives the picture its final suithority — one experiences the passing of time, and that is essential if we are to have the full, unquestioned sense of reality.

3

WHETHER Hollywood can make a picture as good as Odd Man Out is not a hypothetical question. The answer is Yes. In fact, Hollywood made substantially the same picture thirteen years ago under the title The Informer. (After the novel by Liam O’Flaherty, screen play by Dudley Nichols, directed by John Ford, starring Victor McLaglen; each of the last three received the Academy Award for his work, although The Informer was not voted the best picture of the year; for the curious, I note that in spite of having script and direction considered inferior, Mutiny on the Bounty won that award.) Written off as a high-brow aberration — the studio head told me “John Ford wanted to do it, so we let him” — it has been almost continuously shown since it won its Oscars, and is rated a profitable investment.

The award of three Oscars to John Huston (script and directing) and Walter Huston (best supporting actor) may eventually give The Treasure of Sierra Madre such a new lease of life; it was a victim of the turnover system I have described, failing to build sufficient audiences on its first showing in spite of the enthusiasm of the critics.

The case of the Warner Brothers and the Awards is, in fact, an epitome of the Hollywood dilemma; as I have noted, they disowned The Treasure, leaving it an orphan on the doorstep of art; it is also known that they looked with dismay on .Johnny Belinda, which won for them the second most valuable award, for the best actress, Jane Wyman. It is clear that the producers lack the organization to capitalize on the honors which have so embarrassingly fallen upon them. The pictures are being shown again, to be sure, but without fanfare or conviction.

The Awards are artificial stimulants; they prove that people do go to see adult pictures; and the problem of Hollywood is, in essence, to discover a natural, systematic method of arriving at the same end. That it can make the pictures has been amply demonstrated.

The opportunity is exceptional because television will, to an extent, drain off the audience for the average picture, and the West Coast studios will eventually manufacture films cut to the standards of the new medium. They will be free then to make pictures for precisely those in-theater audiences which neither radio-television nor their own average productions have been able to attract. (A recent report is that only 15,000,000 people see the average A picture.) In order to do this successfully they will have to revise their own criteria of maturity and forget both their resentment at the critics and the demands of rarefied intellects.

A perceptive analysis of both the British and the American superior picture will suggest these standards: —

1.The tragic ending is required only for tragic themes. Maturity is in itself neither grim nor hilarious; in essence it consists of respect for the integrity of events; it means that if we start to weave a tragic plot, we do not at the end catch up the threads and tie them into the bowknot of the happy ending.

2. Comedy can be as mature as tragedy. Pygmalion is as satisfying to the adult intelligence as Hamlet, though not so moving. From Nothing Sacred to The Paleface, Hollywood has consistently made first-rate comic pictures; and the creative genius most highly praised by the intellectuals has produced the series of pictures most rewarding at the box office: Charles Chaplin.

3. There is no need to abandon the tempo of the American film — only to vary it in harmony with the character of any given picture. There is no need to abandon the star system — only to use stars intelligently, so that they are integrated into stories, not outside them. There is no need to abandon plot —only to develop plot logically out of character instead of distorting character to fit stereotyped plots.

4. A sense of reality is required, and for this the American picture must learn to deal more candidly with the average American in his actual social and economic situation; but the feature film need never be a political pamphlet. There is no restriction on the creative imagination, and characters may be larger than life if only they are not false to life.

5. In any mood — tragic, seriocomic, or melodramatic — the assumptions regarding normal sexual relations must be honest. This means that the current Production Code must be reinterpreted, to say the least; and that the sadistic and senseless violence of the movies will no longer be substituted for the more normal — and more interesting — passions of mankind.

In sum, the motion picture need only go on to its natural fulfillment in the direction it originally took, when it tried to tell stories to people. It has degenerated into telling myths for children. A story is always single, individual, and enhances our understanding of the many-sided mystery of the human spirit; and myth repeated without profound belief tends to become a formula, totally without reference to the actuality of our lives, manufactured without creativeness, and deadening our capacity to see life clearly.

Every requirement for maturity can be met by pictures made for the great audience — the two thirds of our grown-up citizens who do not go regularly to the movies, but have repeatedly indicated their willingness to appear at the box-office window. Now that the mass audience has failed to support the mass movie sufficiently, the industry may yet find its salvalion in those whom it has for two generations contemptuously turned over to foreign competition. It may yet find that the critics who first announced that the movies are an art were right — and that respect for one’s art is the highroad to success.