Documentary News Letter (1947-1949)

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128 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER FLIGHTS OF FANCY By R. E. WHITEHALL the production of films is a remarkable business, Nothing can ever be taken for granted, as the many critics of the wartime developments in the French cinema are now discovering. The people who attacked the French excursion into an unreal world of witchcraft and magic as 'decadent' and 'unhealthy', are now discoveringthat one does not necessarily have to degenerate under foreign occupation in order to dally with dream desirewithin the confines of a rather frail edifice of celluloid. The flight from reality is a too-frequent phenomenon in the post-war British cinema not to be disturbing. Disturbing in that the types of subjects now in the offing would not have looked out of place on the production schedules of the major British studios during the middle 'thirties. The same ponderous historical subjects (some of them merely revivals of ideas not put into production during that period due to financial difficulties) appear now with a greater gloss and sheen, but with a complete lack of the sound common sense characterizing the great British films between 1939 and the present day and — remembering the early Asquith films, the Hitchcock productions, The Edge of the World, Bank Holiday, The Citadel, and a few other isolated examples — those of pre-war days also. It is easier to get a balanced view of the airy flights of fancy on the part of our producers if one remembers the position in Italy, a country where there is far more reason for an escapist trend, and the fact that Italian film-makers are increasingly turning to the theory that the ultimate aim of the cinema should be to provide something more than entertainment. The whole of post-war life in that broken country has been explored, at first through the semi-documentary, and now in humanistic terms. Best Italian Film Robert Rosselini, the finest exponent of ordinary emotions in a drab world since the Carne of Quai des Brumes and Le Jour se Leve, has followed Rome Open City and Desiderio with Paisa, a bi-lingual film with a mixed Italian-American cast, dealing with the psychological influence of the Allies on the Italian civilian. The film has been hailed as the best ever to come from Italy. Rosselini, who insists on supervising his own films from script to screen is now working with Max Colpet on a film treating the minority problem. This director is not an isolated example of the Italian cinema's awareness of modern problems — there are many others — yet it is rather curious that the first Italian film to reach this country since 1939 is an operatic film which might well have been made in the pre-war years. There is no accountable reason why The Barber of Seville should be given preference over far worthier PHOTOMICROGRAPHY LTD Specialists in Cine-Biology J. V. DURDEN in charge of production Whitehall, Wraysbury films which have not, at the moment of writing, been acquired for exhibition in this country. Even Hollywood, the butt of the universe, has produced, during a season almost as barren as the dust-deserts of Oklahoma, post-war themes of vital importance, maltreated in Till the End of Time, intelligently handled in The Best Years of Our Lives. There is the stuff of drama in reconstruction. If anyone doubts that, let them see what Jill Craigie did with The Way We Live, laying the problem fairly and squarely in the laps of the audience, providing no loophole for evasive rationalization. Miss Craigie's documentary had more dramatic impact than a dozen inoffensive little thrillers or polite drawing room comedies, more genuine cinema than will be found between the covers of Miss du Maurier's latest best-seller, and distribution comparable to that of the newest Continental masterpiece. There are a whole set of new problems — social, economic, cultural, even political (Hollywood is preparing a quartet of films, Crossfire, Gentleman's Agreement, Lights Out, and Earth and High Heaven, all attacking racial prejudice either against Negro or Jew). Ealing, the most socially conscious of British studios, have completed Frieda, dealing with the difficulties of personal Anglo-German relationships at the present time, and are filming A. J. La Bern's extraordinary story, compressed within 24 hours, of small-time crooks in the East End of London. The Boulting Brothers are following Thunder Rock and Fame is the Spur with Graham Greene's Brighton Rock. Gainsborough have Good Time Girl, dealing with delinquency, and Holiday Camp, an unknown quantity from one of the best of the younger documentary directors. Ken Annakin, but elsewhere current films are aimed further and further away from reality. To visit a British studio today is rather like taking a trip to Madame Tussauds, all the great figures of the past century, particularly murderers, are there. Now Blue Lagoon The combination of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat once made two outstanding documents of lower middle-class life, followed by a satire in the tradition of Hogarth and Rowiandson. Now they are intent on filming H. de Vere Stacpoole's Blue Lagoon, a saga wherein the beauteous Miss Jean Simmons and some unknown Hollywood lad are cast away on a desert island. With all too disconcerting frequency this desert island complex seems to be cropping up, as unhealthy in its way as the deliberate distortion or suppression of fact in the new Russian films, such as The Vow. There is no room for thesis films in the Russian manner (as They Came to a City only too well proves), but The Best Years of Our Lives illustrates that present-day problems can be treated in such a way as to combine enthusiastic audience reaction with wider and deeper searching into the moral and spiritual values of the modern world. Any film industry which is to be a living force must mirror the world of which it is part, expressing with vigorous simplicity the heart and mind of the nation. The roots of a film industry should be deep in the national culture. Liu Ling, one of the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, wrote, in the third centur>.\ . . the aflairs of this world appear but as so much duckweed on a river', a sentiment apparently adopted as a motto by far too many film producers.