Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

Record Details:

Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




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.

116 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER IMPROVING BRITAIN'S FILM BUSINESS B y IVOR MONTAGUE The trade unions, that is, the organizations of the workers, in the film business — the technicians and non-technical craftsmen, the actors, extras, musicians— have unitedly* presented certain opinions on the protection and improvement of Britain's film industry to the Board of Trade. The self-interest of those who earn their living in the film business naturally urges such characters to decide that such a business should exist and be encouraged. But here self-interest marches with national interest. Simply a squawk 'Preserve the film industry for me to work in' could not be expected to command much sympathy among the wider public, especially during a period when the man-power needs of valuable industries are clamorous. But Britain needs a film industry and an expanded one. Partly it needs it to save dollars. However, expansion on the scale necessary can't be achieved quickly enough. It would require studio building and equipment manufacture on a scale impossible with the recently existing queue of priorities. So, for saving dollars now, some other means is necessary. Voluntary measures won't achieve the trick, for the British industry is overwhelmingly as to retailing, wholesaling and production, dominated either by direct US interests, or by big concerns whose profit from American product (i.e., US indirect interest) is greater than their British interest, hence who have no particular interest in saving dollars. Hence the Chancellor's powers to impose an ad valorem tax. But still more Britain needs a strengthened and independent industry because films are not soap. Even if you could afford to pay for imported films, it would not be a matter of indifference to you whether you saw one film or another, as it is whether you wash with one piece of soap or another. After the latter, either way you're clean. After the former, you will be left with a lifelong different impression, according to whether you saw film A or film B. • Mr T. O'Brien, MP, of the National Association of Theatrical and Cinematograph Employees, has stepped rather sharply out of the ranks in a BBC broadcast. Mr O'Brien's views arc his own, they do not differ widely from those of his cronies, Johnson (of the Motion Picture Producers of America), Walsh (of the IATSE), and Mr Walter Fuller (of CEA). His organization (the NATKE) subscribed with the other employees' organizations in the FIEC to a common memorandum ivor Montague. It cannot be a matter of national indifference what films we see. Nor what is the general content of that big part of screen time that comes from abroad. Something like 80 per cent of British screentime falls to American films. Don't run away with the illusion that the ideas in American films and in British films are the same, because they have a similar, or at least a mutually comprehensible language on the sound-track. Some American speak the same idea-language as some Englishmen; others, alas, speak a very different one. Take the TU language, for example. Congress has just passed, over the President's veto, anti-trade union legislation that would, thank God, at any rate at present be utterly impossible over here. If such legislation existed in Britain there is not one TU in the film business that would not be put out of business. The union shop would be out, such all-industry agreements as the Studio Features Agreement, the Shorts agreement, or the Labs agreement would be right out. Any strike (such as that recently of the repair and despatch workers) would be out if it could be pretended that it were jurisdictional, and no strike at all might take place with less than two months notice. Any union could be outlawed and any of whose officers were communists or can 'reasonably be supposed to be' such. These are not, thank God, British ideas yet. Is there any reason to suppose that these or similar ideas will seep into American films? Most certainly there is. On March 27 this year Eric Johnson, president of the Motion Picture Producers' Association of America, insisted in Washington before the House Committee on un-American activities that 'the films are serving capitalism effectively as a propaganda medium', and promised that this service would be intensified. At the end of April he stated, just before leaving for Europe to try to increase showing time for US films, that he had prepared for the expedition by a private discussion with President Truman on the importance of implementing American foreign policy through film distribution. There are several hints from Hollywood's past on how this duty will be interpreted. MGM's insistence on distributing the anti-working class Comrade and anti-Soviet Ninotchka during the war, not only in Britain (despite a request to desist from the MOI) but also in Finland while that country was fighting in Russia is one example. Twentieth-Century Fox's false and lying Chetnik is another; here exhibition was persisted in despite official advice from the British Government. But there are clearer hints from the present — e.g. the ugly scuffle among the major companies to be first with the titles Soviet Spies and Iron Curtain, etc., the declared intention to make a film of the report of the Canadian Royal Commission's report. Note, it is the report that is to be used, not the trials or appeals which have already acquitted more than half those named as 'guilty' in the report itself. Note also Hollywood is not making a comedy — or tragedy — out of the Seattle spy trial, where the case collapsed because, when the FBI dictaphone record of the alleged 'Soviet Agents' conversation was at last reproduced in court, it turned out not to be about a secret formula but about a cooking recipe. But more significant than the positive indications are the negative ones. The pen this side has reported something of the witch-hunt started in Hollywood by the un-American Activities House Committee, the pose as sacrificial lambs, coerced into red propaganda against their will, by Adolphe Menjoy, Robert Taylor and Ginger Rogers (per her mother). The atmosphere, and the effects to be apprehended from this pressure, may be gauged from two lists of subversive films requiring investigation supplied to the said committee. First one includes Mission to Moscow. Understandable? Song of Russia. Well — yeah. Song to Remember. A bit odder. Why this one? Do you not remember, this showed the artist sacrificing wealth and devoting art not to love of woman alone but to the liberation of his country. A subversive idea. Action in the Sorth Atlantic. Momansk was the convoy's port of destination; definitely bad. The seamen were hired for their voyage as a trade union HQ; inexcusable. Hitler's Children. So anti-Nazi that it must have been inspired by Communists. Finally — Strange Incident. An anti-lynching film. The lists' compiler commented : 'It is not hard to tell in what direction the propaganda is pointing'. Nor is it hard to tell where objections to it are pointing, either.