How to be a Brit

advantageous, almost essential, to become a really great British
film producer.
    The first aim of a British
film producer should be to teach Hollywood a lesson. Do not be misled, however,
by the examples of Henry V or Pygmalion, which tend to prove that
excellent films can be made of great plays without changing the out-of-date
words of Shakespeare and the un-film-like dialogues of Shaw by ten ‘experts’
who really know better.
    Forget these misleading
examples because it is obvious that Shakespeare could not possibly have had any
film technique, and recent research has proved that he did not even have an
eight-seater saloon car with his own uniformed chauffeur.
    You must not touch any
typically American subject. For instance: a young man of Carthage (Kentucky)
who can whistle beautifully goes to town, and after many disappointments forms
his own swing-band and becomes the leading conductor of New York’s night life —
which, if you can take the implication of Hollywood films seriously, is one of
the highest honours which can be conferred on anyone in that country. At the
same time he falls in love with the cloakroom attendant of a drug-store 2 round the comer, a platinum-blonde, ravishingly beautiful,
who sings a little better than Galli Curci and Deanna Durbin rolled into one
and, in secret, has the greatest histrionic talent of the century. After a
last-minute scandal with the world-famous prima donna she saves the first night
of her lover’s show in the presence of an audience of six million people by
singing Gounod’s slightly adapted song. (‘If you would be my tootsie-bootsie, I would be your tootsie-bootsie’.) The young and mighty
successful band-leader marries the girl and employs Toscanini to clean his
mouth-organ.

    Or — to mention just one
more example of the serious and ‘deep’ type of American films — there is a gay,
buoyant, happy and miserably poor young man in New Golders Green (Alabama), who
becomes tremendously rich just by selling thousands of tractors and jet-propelled
aeroplanes to other poor fellows. The richer he becomes, the unhappier he is —
which is a subtle point to prove that money does not mean happiness,
consequently one had better be content to remain a poor labourer, possibly
unemployed. He buys seven huge motor cars and three private planes and is
bitter and pained; he builds a magnificent and ostentatious palace and gets
gloomier and gloomier; and when the woman he has loved without hope for fifteen
years at last falls in love with him, he breaks down completely and groans and
moans desperately for three days. To increase the ‘deep’ meaning of the film
they photograph the heroes from the most surprising angles: the cameraman
crawls under people’s feet, swings on the chandelier, and hides himself in a
bowl of soup. Everybody is delighted with the new technique and admires the
director’s richness of thought.
    English film directors
follow a different and quite original line. They have discovered somehow that
the majority of the public does not consist, after all, of idiots, and that an
intelligent film is not necessarily foredoomed to failure. It was a tremendous
risk to make experiments based on this assumption, but it has proved worth
while.

    There are certain rules you
must bear in mind if you want to make a really and truly British film.
     
    1. The ‘cockney heart’ has
definitely been discovered, i.e. the fact that even people who drop
their aitches have a heart. The discovery was originally made by Mr Noel
Coward, who is reported to have met a man who knew someone who had actually
seen a cockney from quite near. Ever since it has been essential that a cockney
should figure in every British film and display his heart throughout the
performance.
    2. It has also been
discovered that ordinary men occasionally use unparliamentary expressions in
the course of their every-day conversation. It has been decided that the more
often the adjective referring to the sanguinary character of certain things or
persons is used and the exclamation ‘Damn!’ is uttered, the more realistic and
more convincing the film becomes, as able seamen and flight-sergeants sometimes
go so far as to say ‘Damn!‘ when they are carried away by passion. All bodies
and associations formed to preserve the purity of the English soul should note
that I do not agree with this habit — I simply record it. But as it is a habit,
the author readily agrees to supply by correspondence a