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40 CELLULOID
upon the skill of the acting personnel. It is, in fact, a repetition of the situation which came about in the early years of the German film, when the powerful and traditional acting of such players as Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Fritz Kortner, Paul Wegener and Conrad Veidt overcame the somewhat inexperienced direction of that time. To-day in America, much the same sort of thing is taking place. The consummate skill of such players as Ruth Chatterton, Walter Huston, George Arliss, William Powell, Jack Holt and Paul Lukas has rendered their films of great personal appeal, the direction being quite impersonal and mechanical. Such a hardened observer as myself failed to distinguish any characteristic of direction in The Subway Express, Manslaughter, The Tarnished Lady, Holiday or The Criminal Code. I do not know who directed any of these pictures, but I was impressed by the personality of their respective players.
This conforms with the only outstanding tendency of the American cinema to-day — the gradual disappearance of the individual touch in the striving after standardization. I would point out that this is the selfsame standardization which brought about the deadlock in the silent cinema three years ago, and which again faces the Hollywood executive-committees.
At the risk of redundancy, I would repeat that the making of films is passing more and more into the hands of the men with the greatest financial resources. Money means control, and control means the settingup of production-committees to examine every film as it proceeds from stage to stage before, during, and after production. As anyone in the film trade will admit,