We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
YOUR CRITIC RIGHT OR WRONG I35
his way up in a short while because he had an evident flair for the job. From an adaptor of other people's scripts he became a fully-fledged writer, but, like the screenwriter today, he tended to take his story-material from successful books which had already established some reputation in the minds of the chief patrons of the theatre, books such as Plutarch's Lives or Holinshed's Chronicle, or he quite simply worked on 'remakes' of early and more primitive theatrical successes. On to these sources, good or indifferent, he grafted the product of his particular genius. So today many film-makers of outstanding reputation, such as Carol Reed, graft their powers on to the creative work of others, T. L. Green, Graham Greene or Joseph Conrad.
Shakespeare, too, proved a box-office success. He conquered the difficult conditions of the public theatres of his time, with their large and boisterous audiences, and soon became ' the onely Shake-scene in the countrey ', ' mellifluous and hony-tongued Shakespeare', and 'thou star of poets'. These were his contemporary 'notices'. Like a successful film-maker of today, he bought his big house in the country. The public, for once, was kind to a man of outstanding genius during his lifetime.
The commercial conditions of the cinema by no means entirely preclude the production of good film art. That is not sufficiently stated by either the critics or the film-makers. As in the case of Shakespeare, they condition the nature of the art. One must not wholly despise an institution which has given great popular success to men of the calibre of Griffith, Chaplin, Ford, Clair, Marcel Carne and Carol Reed. This, at any rate, offsets to a certain degree the money that has been made out of the purely vulgar and meretricious stuff the cinema has favoured during the past fifty years. This stuff is perhaps a degree or two less meretricious than the nauseating products of the publishers of commercial pulp literature and of the fashionably pornographic