Cinema: Darned Near Dead

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Hollywood, wanderlusting after fresh backgrounds and a chance to use up blocked foreign funds, keeps packing star off to location all around the globe (TIME June 6). Its No. 1 production colony England, which offers plenty of technical resources and no language bar. This week a leading British film critic voiced some frank qualms over the Yankee invasion

Wrote the Observer's C.A. Lejeune, in the New York Times: "The studios in and around London are tending to be come more & more a back lot for Hollywood." Almost all the major made-in-England films now coming up, Critic Lejeune noted, have a hands-across-the-sea flavor. Among their players (some in British-sponsored movies): Fredric March Orson Welles, Joseph Gotten, Valli, Ingrid Bergman, Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich Jennifer Jones, Robert Montgomery Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

Concluded Critic Lejeune dolefully: "The sort of native industry that struggled up in the war years is no longer observable in Britain. Indications are that British films have had it; and that in so far as contributing a strong indigenous product to international art is concerned, our movies are darned near dead."