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PREFACE
Film-makers for the first time in British feature production found a genuine philosophic reason for making pictures. Just recently we have seen another boom in British films; more costly pictures this time, bigger salaries, bigger 1 presentation ' costs, the whole thing on a grandiose scale, with production-budgets often geared at expectations from the American market. I hope sincerely that Mr. Griffith's remarks about the reception of British films by United States's audiences and by American film exhibitors will fall on heedful ears.1 He writes with first-hand knowledge, and I vouchsafe he has the interests of good film-making in Britain at heart.
The Rank Empire has, it is said, brought some degree of organisation into the chaos of British feature film production. Under Rank's auspices certain notable films have been made that have given many people a new faith in native film production. Great Expectations and Odd Man Out were culminations of a renaissance that began with The Foreman Went to France, Millions Like Us and The Way Ahead. During the war years a new honesty and integrity and freshness broke into British feature production, but the indications to-day are that these values have not been carried over into post-war. The realism and fidelity to life of the best of the wartime films have been replaced by an escape into romanticism and historical set-pieces. The familiar adaptation of successful novels and plays seems to have once again ousted the tendency during the war for stories to be written specially for the screen. We shall always, of course, have with us the temptation for producers to acquire for the screen books and plays that have achieved a public welcome. But if we look back at the outstanding works of the cinema, it is mainly the films which are wholly original in conception that have created film history: Intolerance, Caligari, Nanook, Potemkin, The Last Laugh, A Nous la Liberie, Kameradschaft, The Public Enemy, Toni, The Way Ahead, The True Glory, Monsieur Verdoux and 1 Vide, pages 552, 553, 561.
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