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The Story of the Year.
7
DISILLUSION
By S. G. RAYMENT,
Editor of Kinematograph Weekly.
HE aspect of grim earnestness and even anxiety which
marks every department of the film business at the
dawn of 1939 sits very ill on a branch of enterprise devoted to amusement and entertainment. But although as far as the public is concerned we have been able to supply first-class fare, in ever-growing conditions of luxury, we behind the scenes have serious reason to question the healthy condition of business, and the experience of its first nine months' working makes us less and less confident about the efficacy of the new Films Act.
Designed as a measure which would ensure the well-being of British production, the methods and degrees of encouragement were amended and adjusted up to the last possible moment before the Act appeared on the Statute Book, with what success the New Year stocktaking tells only too well.
HOPE, not achievement, is the best we can register as the early results of the enactment, but he would be an optimist who would expect to see any material advancement in the near future, or at least any harvest at all proportionate to the labour and energy that went to the preparatory stages.
Enthusiasm and confidence are essentially the spirits that have to animate the efforts in aid of British films, but my own task is to act as a candid friend, to whom a realistic appreciation of things as they are is more important than the presentation of only the bright side of the medal.
I am far from being a pessimist, but I insist upon the need to face the facts. These prove that in our studios there is the man-power, the equipment and the enterprise to produce pictures ranking in quality with the best the world can make. Even more important, they have been proved as attractive to the general public, without which the most expensive or artistic films ever produced are without interest to the present argument.