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THE AMERICAN FILM 41
it is one chance to a hundred that a good film, as we know a good film, will come unharmed through this process of production according to recipe. This system of committee-made pictures is gradually achieving a stranglehold on the freedom of the medium and is narrowing the opportunities of the individualist. A director is limited to making one type of picture and that entirely according to the rules laid down by the production-committee. Very few directors can stand out against this dominance and still invest their work with personal feeling.
Chaplin is an independent producer and can therefore remain aloof. Stroheim is very often out of work. Vidor has failed to maintain his early promise. Sternberg loses initiative in Hollywood but is interesting (with Pommer) in Germany. Feyder has achieved nothing in America. George Hill might realize something big if allowed the freedom. Milestone laboured under difficulties with Universal and secured liberty with Howard Hughes. As far as I am aware, Lubitsch is the only director to retain his personal touch under executive supervision. He has risen to unprecedented heights with the introduction of sound, and has been in his element when making Monte Carlo and The Love Parade. For the rest, they have become subservient to the tyranny of the executive-committees.
Not a great deal of skill is necessary in order to perceive that Hollywood to-day is in a far from enviable position. Until the coming of speech, America never worried greatly over the high expenditure on its pictures; in the long run the box-office usually made its way whatever the costs of production. But since the