HOLLYWOOD AND THE STATUS QUO.

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 162, 31 July 1942, Page 3

HOLLYWOOD AND THE STATUS QUO.

: »ir,-G.M.'s little outburst was unexpected; but how welcome! Hollywood’s status quo is exemplified in that mediocre Preston Sturges film, Sullivan’s Travels. The director-producer does not of course realise that people may laugh because they want escape, but that any relief is momentary; from laughter there is the quick return to tears, and return to the hopeless struggle. Reality always has it over laughter. Artificial laughter is here, then gone: reality and the hunger of the body are here all the time; the hunger of the soul could be included too because the soul, if it is anything, is that within us that cries out for satisfaction in life; not money and all those things dished up by Hollywood, but comfort, untroubled living, and the freedom to work as one wants to work whether it’ be writing, carpentering, farming, plumbing or what-have-you. We don’t envy all those actresses with their rich clothes; all we envy is the perfect bliss, of mind with which they ,flit from one of life’s problems (usuallf in their instance to do with Men) to the next. And if our Hollywood producerdirector changes his mind (or is permitted by the Big Men to change it) and decides to investigate things as they ate, then let him utilise the brains of

men like John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, William Saroyan, Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright, men who see people as Tolstoy and Dostoevski saw them, as Maupassant and Tchekhov saw them, as Henry Fielding and Samuel Butler saw them. Let him utilise the brains of real artists, not mere penpushers. For English studios there is H. E. Bates whose The Poacher is ten times -a thousand times better than Gone With the Wind; from Ireland have come Liam O’Flaherty and Sean O’Faolain; from France now comes André Malraux with all his faults. The pictures we want to see are undiluted versions of books like In Dubious Battle, My Name is Aram, Days of Hape, Uncle Tom’s Children, and Native Son; and now is the right time to produce a grand spectacle solely based on War and Peace. This protest does not exclude from the cinema pleasant fantasy, but the fantasy should have some purpose or some link with life; it should not be so many minutes of airy nothingness. For a start we could shove out of the Hollywood scene all but the players who have proved themselves sincere artists; we should then be left with the ‘likes of Bette Davis, Spencer Tracy, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, Greta Garbo (real version) and a_ few others. The rest can go. There are plenty to take their places. Orson Welles could assemble a brilliant cast any day of the week. A word to scoffers: intellectual entertainment is admittedly risky, but there are dozens of ordinary bewildered people dissatisfied with what the cinema is giving them; they may not know why they are dissatisfied but they would know when the "New Order" came in. Subconsciously, ordinary people are splendid critics. Also, the cinema is not catering for what Americans want. Read the reviews of the New Yorker, Time, and such like papers for this.

TOM

JOAD

(Auckland). |

Sir,-Congratulations to G.M. on his "Escape by the Stalls Entrance" article, particularly his last paragraph. The fault as I see it lies in the glaring fact that three-quarters of our films are adapted from Western stage plays, and that stage to-day, for preservation, features only "the rich and _ leisured cocktail-sipping class." The modern cinema is a specific form of art and until Hollywood and England, aided by public opinion, stop this mere mechanical copying of the stage and, in its place, substitute material written for the cinema’s possibilities of expression, we shall continue to be nauseated by "mass-pro-duced things from the sausage machines of the cinema industry." Conceivably, had motion picture art used the last few years for development and not for gadding into the preserve of the legitimate stage, Citizen Kane would be now "old stuff." To see this picture after so many filmed stage plays is like returning to the open country after an overdose of city. The hurry, the noise, the nervousness to say all that can be said in a time too short to say it, give place to the wide sweep of emotions expressed in the language of the motion picture.

ROY A.

EVANS

(Christchurch). |