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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
success in Hollywood, may have been said to have created an English style; most of the others are forgotten, including Jew Suss.1
In those boom years up till 1936, money was poured into production, much of it to entrepreneurs who had no knowledge or experience of film-making. ' In the boom period, £4,000,000 was invested in one period of ten months. Most of it disappeared and the great City geniuses are still wondering where it all went ', wrote the Association of Cine-Technicians.2
It would have amazed the financiers, and probably even Korda himself, to see what actually did happen in the United States to his films and those of the other producers. United Artists distribution amounted to no more than a mouse's share of the American market, and the particular share which British films got was a curious one. United Artists themselves owned no theatres in the United States ; all the other major Hollywood producers did; consequently only small independent exhibitors (who usually could not get, or pay for, the best Hollywood product) booked the productions of Denham, Elstree and Shepherds Bush. The audiences which came to these small theatres were city slum-dwellers, small-town proletarians, farmers and cowboys. Even if they could understand the West End accents, which was more than doubtful, they could not understand the films. Some British pictures of the period certainly had ideas, taste and talent. There was only
1 C. A. Lejeune's following remarks on that film are worth repeating : 1 With all the sympathy in the world for the suppressed Jew, I fancy that there are other problems worthy of being tackled at some expense by our native film industry. At the cost of being repetitious, I suggest that there is still unemployment, there is still ship-building, and there is still farming. We have an industrial north that is bigger than Gracie Fields running round a Blackpool fun fair. We have a fishing fleet or two, and a railway system, and some fairly acute problems of education. Gaumont-British have made a thoughtful gesture in devoting the proceeds of the Jew Suss premiere to the fund for the distressed miners, but there is nothing, so far as I can see, to prevent them thinking still harder, and devoting to a film of British industry, British agriculture, or for that matter, British mining, the same care and money that they hav^ spent so generously on a film about a little German municipality of two hundred years ago.' (The Observer, 1934).
2 Film Business is Big Business (A.C.T., 1939).
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