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DEVELOPMENT OF FILM TECHNIQUE IN BRITAIN
The Modern Fiction Film
If we are to examine experimental developments in the feature fiction film during the period immediately prior to the war and in subsequent years we must turn in our tracks. As always in these matters, one is on the thin ice of personal opinion, but from the early years of the sound film, from the time that is when Hitchcock and Asquith were making the contribution already noted, I am aware of little that was new until John Baxter made his unconventional claim for attention. His early work is not well known. He believed in substituting for high production expenditure his technical ingenuity and a special knowledge of his subject-matter. His study of the down-and-out population of London led to the making of Doss House, and many of his films have shown a special concern for the poor. It was not, however, until the production of Love on the Dole in 1941 that it became clear to a wide public that a British feature film director had emerged with strong and outspoken views on social questions. The film was, of course, the screen version of Walter Greenwood's successful play, but Baxter was doing much more than point a camera through a proscenium opening. The film version showed insight into working-class character and an unprecedented ability to recreate amongst studio sets some of the real feeling of slum life. In a later film, The Common Touch, the story throws rich and poor together in a series of evocative situations and here John Baxter contributed his own social and political ideas. It is a film which received less attention that it deserved. Baxter returned for his setting to the London locale of Doss House, but he added to the realism of that production a curious and individual quality of fantasy and of lyricism. It may be argued that the film fails in reaching no hard and fast political or even sociological conclusions. It has been called merely sentimental in its implicit call for a recognition of brotherhood beneath the badges of society. Yet the rich colour of its characterization and the gusto of its symbolism gives the film some of the simple wisdom of a mediaeval allegory.
The British feature film made great strides during the later years of the war. For many of us a foretaste of things to come was provided in 1943 by the appearance of Millions Like Us, a film written and directed by Frank Launder and Sydney Gilliat. Much
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