Challenge to Hollywood

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 420, 11 July 1947, Page 25

Challenge to Hollywood

TWENTY YEARS OF BRITISH FILM. The National Cinema Series. Falcon Press, London. T is well known-perhaps almost too well known, because there is now some danger of smug complacencythat the British film industry is in a more flourishing condition to-day than it has ever been in its history; and that it now represents a challenge to the world supremacy of Hollywood which even Hollywood is beginning to take seriously. But the struggle to bring the industry to its present healthy state, and to create films which are "national" in the best sense of that now dangerous word (as Michael Balcon puts it), has not been easy. At least once the patient very nearly died, and even to-day a relapse, though perhaps not likely, could still prove fatal. Much will depend on the manner in which Hollywood faces up to the British challenge-one may be sure that it will not be refusedand on the ability of British film-makers to profit by the lessons which they should have learnt during the past 20 years. The story of those two decades is told in the four essays and 100 illustratidns from representative British films of the 1925-45 period, which comprise this attractive and ‘intelligent survey, the first of a series dealing with the

development of the cinema as an art and as a form of social expression in a number of different countries. It is symptomatic of the heightened and more intelligent public interest now: being taken in the, film that books like these are being. produced, The four writers in the present volume are Michael Balcon, one of Britain’s foremost producers and directors and, though now under the wing of Mr. Rank, still a man with an independent outlook; Ernest Lindgren, curator of the British National Film Library (who *writes on the early feature film); Forsyth Hardy, who discusses the documentary-*"the distinctively British contribution to the cinema"; and Roger Manvell, research officer of the British Film Institute, who deais more specifically with the renaissance of the British feature, All four essayists look to the past, of courseand sometimes through. rather. rosecoloured spectacles-but they also look to the future, and their common viewpoint is well expressed by Manvell in his concluding paragraph: "British films must retain their national integrity without becoming merely insular; they must be honestly British without being dull as entertainment. The best cinema of other countries’ has been able to con- tribute a national art to motion pictures. Having taken our place alongside them we must continue to make pictures which justify the claim that the film is the most progressive popular art of the 20th century."