The cinema : 1952 (1952)

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YOUR CRITIC RIGHT OR WRONG ! I45 the narrative complexities and the camera style of Kane became common property three or four years later : the same is true of the approach to period and the mannered dialogue of The Magnificent Ambersons. From this point of view, probably few commercial producers would insist that Welles was a loss as far as Hollywood was concerned. It is simply the fate of some original creative artists, like Bresson in France or Visconti in Italy, to be too far ahead of their public and to see others turn their discoveries later to popular use. (There is a parallel in painting, in which Picasso, unacceptable to many, has become generally accepted through commercialized art.) This kind of interchange between commerce and art invalidates many critical generalizations, even makes it impossible to define exactly how good films come to be made within the system. What the critic can do, though, is to explore the varying levels on which good films do emerge, to discover some of the reasons behind their emergence. While the answers are more likely to lie in an individual than a process, the mere fact of such individuals operating successfully, has, of course, its implications. It is not so difficult to draw distinctions on the familiar levels : of the thriller, for instance, or the western, or the domestic comedy. Mass-produced genres are the most frequently debased, and the exceptions stand out more clearly. The difficulty is to know where exactly to draw the line. In an industry that produces on such a scale, it is futile to complain of mechanical repetition. All one can do is to be grateful to the producer with imagination who manages to inject freshness and style into popular genres (as Dore Schary did at R.K.O., and does now at M.G.M.) and to object to the factorization of vicious elements of brutality, for example, or furtive sexual titillation, and other appeals to degraded human responses. There will always be varying levels of popular production, as of popular taste, but the more a personal quality can be brought to it and the less cynical