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THE AMERICAN FILM
broke loose after a time and returned to the European fold, where they have for the most part failed to regain their former status. So strong is the dollar influence of Hollywood that it is necessary to consider the works of these directors in two phases, the pre-Hollywood and the American period. For example, on the score of appearances, I find it impossible to accept the Murnau who made Faust and The Last Laugh as the same man who later made Sunrise and The Four Devils. Some link between the two pairs of films is sought in vain. They seem the work of separate persons: the first of an artist, working with sincerity under harmonious surroundings; the second of a pseudo-artist muddling under extreme difficulties.
Of the individual influence of the Europeans on the American movie more will be said later, but it is to be remembered that their work was to set examples for the younger Hollywood school of directors to imitate. Lubitsch's The Marriage Circle and Kiss Me Again type of film served as a copy-book to a dozen of the young directors. Monta Bell, Mai St. Clair, Victor Heerman, Frank Tuttle, Harry Beaumont, Roy del Ruth, William Wellman, and all the rest of these clever young men have modelled their work on a mixture of Lubitsch and Chaplin. It was the era of a new type of comedy, not the slapstick of Lloyd or the ludicrous style of Keaton, but a suave, polished, slick, slightly-satirical, sexual comedy. It was a fusion, perhaps, of the American flair for brilliance and the German tendency towards the psychological. It was to produce the Man, Woman and Sin, Sex in Fetters, Broadway After Midnight type of movie. It was a new quality in the American film, quite different from the natural western element and the spectacle picture, and has been tremendously successful. It is found to-day in the plentiful adaptations of Lonsdale and Somerset Maugham plays to the dialogue film. Charming Sinners, Interference, and The Last of Mrs. Cheyney are cases in point.
It is not illogical that such an industry as the American movie, possessing an aim of the maximum amount of profit from the minimum necessary expenditure of time and labour, should be constructed on an extremely well-organised basis. Whatever may be said against American methods, it cannot be denied that they have developed their system of working to a highly perfected state. No man finds employment in a Hollywood film studio unless he knows his
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