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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
insincerity and artificiality. The result will be a mongrel film which belongs to no country/1
The basic formula of the Private Life idea was probably derived from the Lubitsch films of the early twenties (among which, be it remembered, was Jannings* portrait of bluff King Hal in Anne Boleyn) ; the style and purpose were borrowed from John Erskine, whose novels, including The Private Life of Helen of Troy, were the American expression of the impulse to humanise, and to debunk, history which arose shortly after World War I. This barren sophistication seemed already to have exhausted itself before the economic depression, and the success of Henry VIII might, therefore, seem all the more surprising. The reason was not far to seek. It was the story of a man who had six wives.
This in itself was nothing to its discredit. The Italian film Open City earned a million dollars in America solely on the basis of pornographic advertising, not on its value as a great social document. But it was somewhat surprising that few in the British Film Industry took the trouble to analyse the sources of the film's appeal, apart from its scintillating technique. The box-office said that a film made in Britain could make money in the world market, if its production budget was not excessively high. It was now simply a question of more and bigger Private Lives, financed by the City and Insurance millions, with the magician Korda leading the van and the rest of the Continentals scrambling after him.2
Korda himself seems to have agreed with this diagnosis. The private lives of Catherine the Great, Rembrandt, Don Juan, and even the Gannets, were explored, but rather more expensively than Henry; the Fairbankses, the Czinners, Laugh ton when he could be lured away from California,
1 Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1, Autumn, 1933.
2 Time and Tide (29 September, 1934) stated that Count Toeplitz de Grand Ry, gave ' Korda the financial assistance Korda had failed everywhere else to get for The Private Life of Henry VIII ', and Catherine the Great, as well as Henry, were presented as KordaToeplitz productions. Toeplitz later produced The Love Affair of the Dictator (cf, p. 551),
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