Europeans in Hollywood: Success, Failure and Frustration

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume IX, Number I, Spring, 1978 Europeans in Hollywood: Success, Failure and Frustration Don Whittemoreand Philip Alan Cecchettini. Passport to Hollywood. \ewYork:McGraw Hill, 1976,558 pp. Jahn Baxter. The Hollywood Exiles. London: Macdonald and Jane's, !976. 242pp. Graham Petrie Almost from its beginnings, American cinema has been able to lure some of the finestforeign talent-writers, directors, actors and cameramen-to work forit, sometimes (most notably with actors and cameramen) putting their abilities to good use, and just as frequently (especially where writers and directors are concerned) wasting, distorting, frustrating or neglecting the very qualities that brought these figures to the forefront in the first place. For every Lubitsch, Curtiz, Wilder or Hitchcock who adapted quickly to the demands of Hollywood and, in many cases, went on to produce work of high quality, there are two or three Sjostroms, Christensens, Eisensteins or Renoirs who were rarely allowed to work on films that suited their particular creative lbilities and who often ended by retiring from Hollywood, baffled, angry and frustrated-in some cases to direct few films, or even none at all, for the remainder of their careers. Therehave been three main periods during which the foreign influx was at ttsheight.In the 1920's, Hollywood deliberately set out to destroy the challenge of, especially, the Swedish and German films that were capturing a meableportion of the European, and even the American market, by buying upmost of the figures who had contributed to their success: Garbo and Janningsamong the actors, Sjostrom, Stiller, Christensen, Lubitsch, Leni andMurnau among the directors, were among those who succumbed. Though they brought with them a whole host of new ideas and techniques thatcontributed to the revitalization of Hollywood in this period, the 126 Graham paradox is that few of them were given anything like sufficient freedom t· work on subjects of their own choice and in a style that suited them. AHolli~ wood that was gradually perfecting the assembly line techniques thatwe;e to dominate the industry during the 1930's and 1940's had little timefor artists who required a certain degree of spontaneity and freedom intheir work and who were unhappy with attempts to typecast them and associatt them with a particular style or subject. (Hollywood seemed to assume, for example, that Europe was one simple, undifferentiated mass, so tha: Christensen, a Dane, was considered just the right person for a filmonth: Russian Revolution, Mockery, and Stiller, a Swede, found himself directing '1 Hotel Imperial, set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) ', Although some great films- The Wind, The Scarlet Letter, TheMamagi Circle, Sunrise-emerged from, or despite, these conditions, theyweri achieved at the cost of broken careers or even broken lives. Few ofthe immigrants could cope with a system that interfered with their projectsa:, every stage from the writing and casting to the final editing, and thattreated 1 them as artisans who could be dismissed in mid-shooting to allow thefilm to be completed by a total stranger. The coming of sound, which led toanever more rigidly controlled pattern of shooting in the studios, with itsextra requirement of a fluency in English that had not been so essential previously, was the last straw for most of them: by 1931 Sjostrom and Christensen,we no longer working in Hollywood, while Murnau, Leni and Stiller were ail dead-Stiller's death, at least, being partly attributable to the strainsand disappointments of his Hollywood experience. Only Lubitsch, amongthe directors of this group, flourished and was able to develop a style and matter that were both personally congenial and commerically profitable. Other European directors-Feyder from France, Eisenstein from Fejos and Korda from Hungary-also found their way to Hollywood late 1920's, but their overall experience matched that of the Germans Scandinavians, and they too quickly retreated, leaving a few scatteredgemi (Lonesome by Fejos, Daybreak by Feyder) behind them. The next large-scale influx came at the end of the following decade,whe~ artists fleeing from Nazi-controlled Europe sought refuge in America-a refuge which, as John Baxter points out in one of the best chapters inThi Hollywood Exiles, was grudgingly and resentfully provided, with theresu:t that...