Sight and Sound (2002) - Profile: Foreign Correspondent
Details
- article: Profile: Foreign Correspondent
- journal: Sight and Sound (01/Oct/2002)
- issue: volume 12, issue 10, pages 12-13
- journal ISSN: 0037-4806
- publisher: British Film Institute
- keywords: Academy Awards, Aldous Huxley, Alexander Mackendrick, Alfred Hitchcock, American cinema, Anniversaries, California, Careers, Charles Laughton, Christopher Isherwood, Emigration, Film (USA), Film directors, Film history, Foreign Correspondent (1940), Gavin Lambert, Hollywood, John Boorman, Lindsay Anderson, Magazines, New York City, New York, Novelists, Performing Arts History, Raymond Chandler, Robert Stevenson, San Francisco, California, Screenwriters, Sight & Sound, Sight and Sound, United States, Vertigo (1958), W. Somerset Maugham
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Abstract
Wrathall interviews Gavin Lambert, an Oscar-nominated movie director, and asks why so many British filmmakers flourish in Los Angeles.
Article
To open a 70th-anniversary series John Wrathall talks to former S&S editor Gavin Lambert and asks why so many British film-makers flourish in LA
For as long as it has existed, the British film industry has lurched cyclically between boom and bust, and the recent collapse of FilmFour only highlights the sector's unpredictability. In such circumstances it's easy to see why ever since the 19305 so many British writers and directors have forsaken their native land for Hollywood. It's where the money is. The climate is enticing. And unlike their fellow Europeans, Britons have no language barrier to contend with. In fact, the attractions are so obvious that those who succumb to them are often accused of selling out. As Gavin Lambert wrote in these pages in November 1993, in an obituary of Tony Richardson, who headed west after Tom Jones swept the 1964 Oscars: "One of the more peculiar ethical hang-ups of the English is that an Englishman may expatriate himself to France or Italy without selling his soul to the devil, but if he transplants himself to California he's hell-bent for corruption. Although nobody reproached Graham Greene for settling in Antibes, Isherwood, Huxley, Hitchcock, Hockney and the rest took a great deal of flak when they moved to Los Angeles."
The attitude Lambert identifies dates back to 1939, when Britons who sat out World War II in California were pilloried as deserters. Some indeed were committed pacifists, including Aldous Huxley and Robert Stevenson, who directed Huxley's 1944 adaptation of Jane Eyre for 20th Century Fox. Others - Alfred Hitchcock for one - may have seen their work in Holl...
