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HOLLYWOOD GLOSS IS OFF 343
chromium-plated soda fountain became aware that, behind skyscraper and luxury train, was a nation one third of whom lived in slums. (Even in socially-superior Boston one house in five has been condemned and one in ten of the population of the U.S. lives in dwellings without running water, baths and indoor sanitation). The teen-agers learned for the first time that, in the South, the lynching of negroes is a common occurrence, that the average Middle Westerner believes that his three States are responsible for feeding the world, a world of down-and-outs for ever seeking a hand out.
The general overall picture was disappointing. Henceforth the gloss was off the Hollywood movie. The tide turned in favour of the more truthful British picture.
There were contributory factors, too. The American Censor appeared not to understand British films. Though Errol Flynn as an American soldier might win a Burma campaign without the aid of the numerically superior British, the American censor could not allow a British " dam " or " God " in the tenser moments of Britishmade war dramas, and though, at a later date, certain mean, moody and magnificent American young women could romp in the hay with their sadistically inclined playmates, the dresses which Margaret Lockwood wore in The Wicked Lady had to be made more demure lest they offend the Great American Matron.
A grown-up Shirley Temple could appear in a skittish farce about a fifteen-year-old girl who pretends to be pregnant by the boy next door, but it was thought desirable to expurgate some of Shakespeare's more virile lines from Henry V.
So perhaps it is not surprising that British newspaper readers gained the impression that Joe Breen, of the American Hays organisation, which keeps an ever-watchful eye on the screen, was discriminating unfairly against British pictures.
The decline in the popularity of the American film in Britain is not, of course, entirely due to these extraneous causes but also to a tendency towards staleness in the pictures themselves.
Hollywood, from being a place for pioneers, has now become a paradise for producers. Once the director remained supreme on the studio floor. Now he is the lackey of the producer in the front office. He is handed a script and told to shoot it exactly as written. He does not need inspiration nearly so much as he needs a time clock.
The film-goer cares not at all that a picture is a Zukor, a Zeidman or Zimbalist production.