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270 ARTISTIC FREEDOM STULTIFIED
at the studio. Its repercussions were felt in Italy. Brabin, Walsh and Gertrude Olmsted were taken out of the cast and were replaced by Fred Niblo, Ramon Novarro, and May McAvoy, and the unit was recalled from Italy and the picture was started afresh in its entirety in Hollywood, but at least on purely commercial grounds such a decision was justified. In London Ben Hur ran for forty-eight weeks at The Tivoli, the longest run of any silent film.
In fact, big hits came from the re-vamped organisation in an unending stream and continue to this day. From this studio came The Big Parade, He Who Gets Slapped, The Broadway Melody, Trader Horn, The Big House and Anna Christie, and countless more.
Efficiency experts were appointed in some studios. They stultified almost everything appertaining to productions, and so ended the days when producers would take a chance on a story or a star without recourse to nation-wide polls conducted to discover the lowest common intelligence quotient at which a star or story should be aimed in order to derive the biggest returns at the box office.
Surprisingly, the old method, or rather lack of method, was responsible for some very big hits indeed, a spirit of adventuring which, although by no means absent, has been increasingly curbed of late in America. In Britain, the years of the second World War saw a corresponding increase in courage in finding new themes and players.
To-day we still have to seek in the American scene for pictures of the scale of The Covered Waggon and Cimarron, of King of Kings, Cavalcade and San Francisco, of Grand Hotel, Ten Commandments and What Price Glory ? In eight or nine years we have had Gone With the Wind and For Whom the Bell Tolls, spacious films but in a sad minority amongst so many Mrs. Minivers, Yankee Doodle Dandy s, and Frenchmen's Creeks.
We still have stars who become popular and established favourites in their first pictures, but to-day careers are planned by the experts appointed by the bankers (" to protect their investment ") with an almost fanatical precision. Yesteryear stars rose to eminence often by pure chance. Could Rudolph Valentino, the greatest matinee idol the screen has ever known, duplicate to-day the circumstances which raised him from the extras' ranks ?
He was a small part player and dancer employed by Metro. The fortunes of the company were not bright in 191 8. Cinema attendances had fallen off because of the influenza epidemic which