We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
spectacular historical film; and the comedy drama with which various names are associated. All of these have specific virtues. The ideas which Mr. Wells supplied are fundamentally more respectable, as ideas, than those of the average Hollywood film. In the historical pictures I have a feeling that characters are treated with a little more regard for historical verity than they are in Hollywood; and in the comedies there is a quiet fund of humour which contrasts with the more brittle wit of Hollywood. Yet all of these qualities seem to be bought at a high price — the one price which the movies cannot pay. Again and again these movies stop moving. Even those made by American directors fall under the spell. In their good parts they recall Hollywood, and in their bad they prove that Hollywood is right.
I think that this is a natural fault of an inexperienced system of production. As time goes on, the films of England should be able to conserve the virtues I have mentioned and many others without sacrificing the only life of the movie. I have suggested elsewhere in this book that there is a field in which British producers may teach America a lesson — but it is not a field of great profit. Obviously, if they want great profit, they are not going to abandon the eighteen thousand motion-picture theatres in the United States with their eighty million attendance every week. The pressure of these rolling zeros is bound to be felt, and British production will continue to make concessions to American taste.
Somebody ought to point out to the British producers before they become as successful and as obstinate as the American producers are, that people will go to see intelligently made moving pictures — but the pictures have to move. The success of the American movies is due to many separate circumstances —some of which are canvassed in this book. But all of them put together could not have made the American movie so dominant if it were not for two things: the moving picture corresponds to something fundamental in American life — America has always been on the move and has kept moving, its history, as an Englishman divined, is a history of transportation;1 the second thing is that the people who made the movies profoundly believe in them and thoroughly enjoy them. Once in a while Hollywood protests that it would like to do better things but that it must give the people what people want.
1 Philip Guedalla in The Hundred Years.
3