Films Facts and Forecasts (1927)

CHAPTER II BRITISH FILMS The Americans have been lucky over this film-business. Just when they needed money to expand it, along came the war, and everyone soon had money to burn. In the beginning American financiers were no more anxious than European banks are today to lend the film-man money. Enormous sums were lost, and ruin stared all pioneers in the face (ask Mr. Goldwyn, Mr. Loew, or Mr. Zukor), before the producer began to profit from experience. Gradually the financiers saw there was more in the film than a toy, and the receipts for munitions sold to Europe began to go into celluloid and the bricks and mortar of the new-fangled supercinema. Another thing: from the beginning the American producer has had to cater for a cosmopolitan audience. There are whole districts in Pennsylvania, for example, where the people today can speak nothing but German. The film-producer thus had excellent material on which to practise. He had to make a film with a universal appeal, a film that appealed not merely to the New York Irish, but to the Swede, the Hungarian, the Russian, the Pole. All kinds of tastes had to be considered, and the film was debarred from stressing any one national characteristic unduly. It was not surprising, therefore, that in America almost all the film-business passed into Jewish hands. The Jews have a natural aptitude for evolving and ii