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144 THE CINEMA
managed from time to time to produce serious and uncompromised work. Roger ManvelPs selection of non-commercial sponsorship is, by the way, no more reliable than any other kind of sponsorship : many a documentarist has had to make the same kind of concessions to his sponsor that a feature film director has made to his studio. Those who work writhin the framework and they are the majority nowadays may reach artistic fulfilment through a number of ways : through controlling their own companies (Chaplin), through making commercially successful potboilers to gain specific freedom for occasional films (Ford), or through after they have established a reputation contracting themselves only to individual companies for individual films. Most of the French and Italian directors have worked this way, and in America Zinnemann seems to have done the same thing with success. Other directors, like Stroheim at M.G.M., or Renoir in America, have found themselves at a deadlock with their employers, with the result that they abandoned their films and saw them completed (and in most cases mutilated) by somebody else.
Awareness of these conditions is essential to the critic, whether he is 'engaged' or a theorist keeping his distance from the industry. At one end of the scale, he must distinguish between the acceptable, unpretentious commercial film and the unworthy, meretricious one : at the other, between the uncompromised work of art and the work of art flawed by commercialism. Between these, various intermediate problems arise the potboiler made by the serious artist (one cannot treat Four Men and a Prayer as if it were made with the same ambitions as The Grapes of Wrath), and the commercial cinema's habit of gradually absorbing the devices and research of serious film-makers.' Citizen Kane, for example, was a notable box-office failure, and likewise The Magnificent Ambersons : stylistically, none the less, their influence on Hollywood has been considerable. In diluted form,