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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
up. A fortunate few succeeded in finding jobs outside the Industry altogether. But for the majority that was impossible. Their livelihoods depended on their specialised skill, and these men whose creative ability had gone into production of so many films now found that their services were unwanted.'1 Korda himself, with controllers in the studio, managed to keep going by oscillating between Hollywood and London.
In 1937, possibly foreseeing the 1938 Films Act, MetroGoldwyn-Mayer, who until that date had refrained from actual production in Britain, now started making films on a biggish scale, resulting in The Yank at Oxford (1938), Good-bye Mr. Chips (1939), and The Citadel (1939), all three using Hollywood stars and being directed by Americans, Jack Conway, Sam Wood and King Vidor respectively. These films ' made in Britain ' employed some local studio personnel and tied up two of Britain's best producers, Michael Balcon and Victor Saville, but they were presented abroad as American pictures and brought little credit to the British Film Industry as such. When the war came, M-G-M discontinued production.
For the most part, however, genuine British production was dormant until the advent of war, and of J. Arthur Rank into the film arena. Figures like Max Schach and Toeplitz de Grand Ry, who cut such glory a year or two before, faded as promoters of ' super-British ' pictures. Who now remembers The Marriage of Corbal, The Love Affair of the Dictator, and many like them ? Only two films, apart from The Stars Look Down, merit mention at this time : Thorold Dickinson's very well-made, beautifully designed Gaslight (1940) which was subsequently suppressed when Hollywood bought the rights, and John Baxter's Love on the Dole (1941), a sincere attempt to picturise unemployment in the mid-thirties from Walter Greenwood's novel, held up from film adaptation by the Censor until the war had vanquished unemployment, but too studio-bound to be wholly authentic. 1 Film Business is Big Business (A.C.T., 1939).
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