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THE FILM SINCE THEN
world cinema until the war years. All that has since appeared and which has had any substance, has been guided by its example and nourished by its experience. From The Stars Look Down and Edge of the World through Next of Kin, Desert Victory, Target for Tonight, Vfestern Approaches, Journey Together and The Way Ahead to World of Plenty, The World is Rich and Children on Trial, the record of British film achievement is a documentary record. I risk repetition when I emphasise that this is because these films have had something to do with life in Britain as it is lived, and that British fiction films by and large seldom have anything to do with significant life anywhere.
This has everything to do with the future of the British film in the world market. Britain has neither the resources nor the flair for the mass-manufacture of popular entertainment movies a la Hollywood. Thank God she hasn't ! But she has got the intellectual and emotional resources, and she is undergoing the experiences, which could make her the leader of the film of reality. I have no doubt that if the British Film Industry keeps that fact in mind first, last, and always, there will be plenty of foreign markets for British films, even if a new distribution method and a new system of profit and loss, has to be developed to accommodate them.
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Under the system as it has so far prevailed, it is not surprising that Alfred Hitchcock should be the only British film craftsman to achieve an international reputation and commensurate popularity, and then only since he has been in Hollywood.1 This specialist in mystery stories needed no roots in national life for the kind of entertainment he purveyed. The escapist appeal of the mystery is international; it need give no more than the barest simulacrum of reality to achieve suspension of disbelief. To my mind, Hitchcock's success derives
1 1 think Griffith underestimates the international reputation gained by Carol Reed and David Lean, at least in Europe. — PR.
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