II.

Early Developments

Although Britain made a substantial contribution to the development of early cinema, it was soon outpaced by Hollywood and Germany, and many directors, Alfred Hitchcock and Herbert Wilcox included, directed their first films in Munich or Berlin, where technical standards were higher. While they, and such directors as Maurice Elvey, were to have long careers, it was not until the Cinematograph Films Act (1928) that producers saw the incentive for investment in new and advanced technology and studios. The “Quota” Act, as it was known, made it a legal requirement for British cinemas to show a percentage of British-made films: by 1935, this was to be 20 per cent. Within a few years British film production was transformed.

Although it had its downside, with many shoddy films—“Quota quickies”—and American production companies establishing their own British satellites to exploit the market, Britain’s two vertically integrated companies, British International Pictures Ltd (BIP) and Gaumont-British, consolidated their positions with more ambitious productions. BIP, for example, produced three prestigious films directed by E. A. Dupont at its Elstree studios—Moulin Rouge (1928), Piccadilly (1929), and Cape Forlorn (1931)—all of which would have been made in Germany a few years earlier. Cape Forlorn, a sound film, made in three separate versions with three different international casts, is an early example of the multilingual film, an attempt to reach the international markets. When, in 1932, the owners of Gaumont-British, the Ostrer brothers, took over and refurbished Lime Grove Studios, Michael Balcon, as Head of Production, produced his biggest film to date, Rome Express, the prototype train thriller. Written by Sidney Gilliat, who was to become one of Britain’s most important directors, directed by Walter Forde, photographed by the distinguished German cameraman Günther Krampf, and featuring Conrad Veidt in a charismatic performance, it confirmed the belief that high-quality films could be made in Britain and succeed in the United States.

The slump in the German film industry when sound was introduced brought many film technicians to Britain in search of employment. As well as Krampf, the cine-photographers Mutz Greenbaum (later Max Greene) and Otto Heller, and the designers Oscar Werndorff and Alfred Junge were among those who settled permanently in Britain. Almost simultaneously the flamboyant Hungarian director/producer Alexander Korda, who had worked in Berlin, Hollywood, and Paris, came to produce “Quota” films for Paramount. He was followed by producers, writers, and others, driven out of Germany by the rise of Nazism.

The change in the British film scene led to unprecedented developments in the industry. Films, when not consciously domestic in character, were intended for the American market. Korda soon branched out on his own to form London Film Productions, borrowing money from a multitude of backers to produce and direct The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1933, which made a star of Charles Laughton. Its international success led to Korda receiving financial backing from the Prudential Assurance Company and to the building of Britain’s finest studios at Denham, west London, which were intended as a magnet for the best British independent producers and were expected to show a profit from the rental of space alone. Korda’s grasp of American distribution was unique among British producers, and his films, which included a number of major productions, were distributed by United Artists. He directed The Private Life of Don Juan (1934) and Rembrandt (1936); and produced Paul Czinner’s The Rise of Catherine the Great (1934); Harold Young’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1934); The Ghost Goes West (1935) by René Clair; William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936); Jacques Feyder’s Night Without Armour (1937); and Zoltán Korda’s Technicolor romance, The Four Feathers (1939).

Other producers borrowed directly from banks, on a film-by-film basis, and with little financial control. The Capitol Film Corporation, headed by another émigré producer, Max Schach, was responsible for a string of Viennese-influenced, anodyne musicals, such as Abdul the Damned (1935), Pagliacci (1936), and Land Without Music (1937), the last two starring the famous tenor, Richard Tauber. Schach’s most successful film was made at Denham, an adaptation of the stage play Love from a Stranger (1937), but, as with all the films he produced, it was poorly distributed, losing £80,000. In January 1937, Twickenham Film Productions, which produced cheaply made “Quota” films from a tiny studio, collapsed with heavy debts. The auditors revealed the careless financing that was infecting the whole industry and, with a reputed £5 million lost, bank-lending to producers stopped. Receivers were appointed to a whole string of small production companies and Gaumont-British announced losses of nearly £100,000 in February 1937. With no one to fill the studios, Korda lost control of Denham to his financiers and finally to J. Arthur Rank, who, over the next six years, rapidly expanded his films and cinema interests.

Gaumont-British’s expensive “prestige” films, such as Lothar Mendes’s Jew Süss (1933), with Conrad Veidt, and Maurice Elvey’s remake of a German film, The Tunnel (1936), were aimed at the American market, but were financial disasters. Eventually, mounting debts forced the temporary close-down of its studios at Shepherd’s Bush, London. While financial limitations had prevented Gaumont-British from using colour and the rapidly developing technology, it produced some of Hitchcock’s seminal films, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The Thirty-Nine Steps (1936), and The Lady Vanishes (1938), as well as a number of others—I Was a Spy (1933), The Passing of the Third Floor Back (1935), and King Solomon’s Mines (1937) among them. In November 1937, Balcon left to join MGM-British, but he was unhappy working for Louis B. Mayer and, in July 1938, took over Associated Talking Pictures from Basil Dean, eventually changing the studio’s name to Ealing.