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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
For some years, in the early thirties, American audiences marvelled that the few British films they were permited to see were often directed and acted by people for whom there was no longer much demand in Hollywood. It seemed to us then, that British producers were wooing the American market by the extraordinary expedient of offering attractions which that market had already repudiated. Time has now altered the impeachment. It is clear, in retrospect, that many of those fading stars and technicians were sent from Hollywood to Britain by their American employers for a very good reason. In view of the Films Act of 1927, which was law for ten years, it was necessary for Hollywood companies to finance a certain number of films in Britain. How better to do this, and perhaps at the same time to discourage the appearance of native actors and craftsmen, than to use British studios as a burial ground for Hollywood has-beens? Such was the apparent policy for several years, and such indeed it could again become, now that it is once more politic for America to finance films made in Britain. Be that as it may, this example of American policy seems to have had great weight for British producers of the period. They, and American producers operating in Britain, produced vehicles for such players as Corinne Griffith, Bebe Daniels and Esther Ralston, whose very names were unknown to a new generation of American filmgoers which grew up with the talkies. Such a state of affairs could only have arisen from a business psychology such as is described earlier by Rotha. (Vide : pp. 140 et seq.)
The cosmopolitan influence grew partly out of this American policy, and partly out of the fact that British producers of the period obstinately believed that a Continental film-maker was inevitably more gifted than one of their own countrymen. Alexander Korda had made minor films in Europe before going to Hollywood in the mid-twenties to direct his wife, at that time Maria Corda, in a super-production The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927) for First-National. Both the star and the film
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