Word: exhibitors
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Rank & file U.S. movie exhibitors may not care much about cinematic art for its own sake, but they know what they want from Hollywood. Last week the exhibitors drew some conclusions from their box-office receipts. After polling its exhibitor-members across the nation, the Allied States Association announced: Hollywood's pictures (and advertising) have been truckling to the tastes of "sophisticated Broadway audiences" and "professional reviewers," and run a serious risk of becoming "class entertainment...
...actions of the distributors in preventing the HLU from showing these movies would be justified when genuine competition exists. The whole business of 16mm films, rental rates, and other expenses, is based on the consideration that it does not compete with professional theaters. In any competition, the 16mm exhibitor would have an unfair advantage. But such competition does not exist. The U.T. itself says that it is not concerned with the limited audience possible in the Fogg Museum room at long intervals...
Since then the Pathé producer-exhibitor network has gone successively through bankruptcy, reorganization, Nazi occupation, and the purge of collaborators. The Bank of France's Ferdinand Liffran is titular boss, has the help of a potent cross-section of French big business (steel, oils, insurance, cognac and utilities are represented on Pathé's present board). By diligent squeezing Pathé last year made a profit of $151,200 from films and its 35 European theaters...
Hollywood had been providing almost three-fourths of Britain's annual film supply. Last week, after the London premiere of Cecil B. DeMille's The Unconquered, there were less than ten more U.S. pictures awaiting release in Britain. "From here in," said one exhibitor, "it's getting a bit sticky." So far, British exhibitors had been able to fill their bills with reissues and vaudeville acts (Danny Kaye was the doubletalk of London), but reissues were already drawing catcalls from the customers, and few British movie palaces are equipped for vaudeville...
...thought was hardly comforting to the British film industry. In London, an associate of J. Arthur Rank, Britain's foremost producer and largest exhibitor, admitted it was the first time he "had seen the boss really worried." A shortage of U.S. films could starve Rank's movie houses (the Odeon chain) and force them either to close down or run "classics" before dwindling audiences. (Of the 300 new pictures which British movie houses require each year, only about 80 could be produced at home...