Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER JUNE 1940 13 THE "UNUSUAL" FILM MOVEMENT A Filmgoer Remembers i TO SEE good films in London today is simple: you go to the Odeon or the Empire or the Academy ; the Polytechnic, the Paris, the Everyman, the Cinephone or Studio One ; maybe to the Curzon or the Embassy. Few good foreign films fail to get to London. Twenty years ago it was not so easy. Big American films had their premieres at West End theatres, at the Scala, Drury Lane, Covent Garden, the Palace or the London Pavilion. But Continental films, except for the spectacular Ufa product, crept in sideways, lay about in a Wardour Street vault, got maybe (after 1925) a Film Society showing. The Davis brothers were really the first showmen to present Continental films of a "different" kind in London. They owned the Marble Arch Pavilion, then London's premier cinema, and showed Caligaii in 1920 and followed it later by other famous Ufa films — Metropolis and The Spy. The Polytechnic, managed then, as now, by Mr Leslie, ran Destiny in 1924. Anne Boleyn (Deception) and The Golem got Scala showings and that was about all. But none of these cinemas adopted the policy of regularly running "diff'erent" Continental films. If memory is reliable (curse the evacuation!), the first London cinema to announce a Continental policy was the Embassy nearby the Holborn Restaurant. It ran Grune's The Street and Volkoff""s Kean before closing. That was 1924. Like the handsomely produced monthly, "The Silver Screen", the Embassy was before its time. No one else tried the experiment. Occasional Ufa pictures like The Last Laugh, Manon Lescaut. Vaudeville and Berlin went to the Capitol (now the Gaumont) or the New Gallery. Siegfried v^ws given a spectacular setting at the Albert Hall, where Mr Cochran later presented Faust complete with Sir Landon Ronald and orchestra. London had no equivalent of the Paris "little cinemas", no Vieux Colombier, Studio des Ursulines, or Studio 28. Again the story switches to the Davis brothers. Their theatres were now (1927) included in the Gaumont circuit, but the brothers retained the right to book pictures and act as managers. They owned, among others, the small Shaftesbury Avenue Pavilion which showed pictures on their second London run. But it had become dwarfed by the big new theatres and second runs were being well looked after by the new suburban houses. Now part of a chain, it was an awkward house to book for. Thus when Stuart Davis went to Reginald Bromhead, managing director of the circuit, and suggested a new policy, Bromhead agreed. The new policy was to show Continental films, new and old, an idea which Stuart had seen working the year before at the Cameo in New York. Davis was lucky. Wardour (now A.B.P.C.) had long had a Ufa contract and the newest German picture was The Loves of Jeanne Ney which the censor slashed and Wardour retitled The Lusts of the Flesh. D^vis took over the Avenue Pavilion, hung out a banner inviting the Shaftesbury Avenue passers-by to see The Lusts of the Flesh but was shrewd enough to do dual publicity with Pabst's name and for his own new policy. "The Unusual Film Movement" and "The Home of International Film Art" had begun. Stuart did good business with two publics. The one that mattered to him was the "intelligent" audience which was growing as a result of the Film Society's private shows, the little highbrow paper "Close Up", the columns of one or two progressive film critics like C. A. Lejeune in the Manchester Guardian and later The Observer, and Walter Mycroft in the Evening Standard. Iris Barry's book Let's Go to the Pictures also probably helped. Stuart got, kept and enlarged that audience in the two years he ran the Avenue Pavilion. He revived all the old German classics (not so old then), Caligari, Last Laugh, The Street, Manon Lescaut, Warning Shadows, Student of Prague, Tartuff'e, Two Brothers, Vaudeville, Faust, Danton and the rest. He paid £200 to an ex-W and F salesman for a four weeks run of Waxworks and took £1,800. He revived the famous Hollywood classics. Woman of Paris, Greed, Foolish Wives and He Who Gets Slapped. He dug up the Swedish Gosta Berling, the Russian Marriage of the Bear and The Postmaster. He wrote intelligent hand-outs for the press. Above all he made his theatre a place where many people for the time saw The Film at its best. His tiny oflfice became a meeting place for the most ardent film followers. Stuart himself was always the charming host. After a while the film supply gave out so Stuart Davis went off to Paris. Here was a new field, the films of Clair, Cavalcanti, Feyder, Epstein, and the avant-garde shorts of Deslav, Lacombe, Man Ray and the others. He bought the English rights of the lot, started a French season with a white-tie opening and the French ambassador. He introduced London to Finis Terrae, The Italian Straw Hat, Les Deux Timides, En Rade, Rien que les Heures, The Fall of the House of Usher and many others. But his greatest success was with Feyder's Therese Raquin. Griffiths of First-National had a copy sent over from Germany, where it had been made with a Franco-German cast for quota requirements. He was about to send it back unbooked but happened to mention it to Stuart Davis who promptly booked it. Unluckily his press show coincided with an M.G.M. show. Only one critic turned up — Mycroft of the Evening Standard. He gave it the review it deserved. The rest of the press bombarded Stuart to see the film but he refused. Next day they lined up in the public queue. The film did big business, got many provincial bookings and certainly helped to get Feyder his M.G.M. contract in Hollywood. Summer 1929 saw Stuart Davis's contract with Gaumont expire. The latter decided not to carry on the policy and, at Stuart's suggestion, opened the theatre as London's first newsreel cinema. Stuart Davis took over managing the Davis Theatre, Croydon, which he still does. It looked as if London would no longer have a "Home of International Film Art". But down the street was the Windmill Theatre which Elsie Cohen was managing as best as she could with second run pictures. Miss Cohen had for a long time been interested in the Continental film and had worked in Holland and Germany on production. Now at the Windmill she started an "unusual" film movement and was able to get several Soviet films past the censors, her biggest success being Turksih. This lasted until the autumn when the owner of the theatre discontinued films and Van Damm began his famous Revuedeville. Meanwhile a few of the old regulars at the Avenue Pavilion — among them Margery Locket, Paul Rotha, J. B. Holmes and F. Gordon Roe — started the Film Group. Davis gave them his mailing list. They circularised 2,500 people in London to see if they would support a successor to the Avenue Pavilion. Eighty per cent said they would. But no suitable theatre could be found except the Academy, run by Eric Hakim, who used to be a violinist in the Davis theatres. Stuart himself had tried Hakim with the idea but Hakim wanted too big a rent. A week or two later he let Elsie Cohen take over the house and announced a "new" policy of Continental films, old and new. Hakim himself had little faith in the project and thought Miss Cohen crazy when she opened with Dovjenko's Earth. But what could not be foreseen was the talking film. When it did come, it was generally predicted that the French and German film would disappear from London. Yet next April, the Academy will celebrate a decade of its policy for Continental films. The story of London's reception of the Continental talking film is the story of our next month's article in this series on the Specialist Theatre Movement.