Movies: New York Is a Foreign Festival

With the opening of the fourth annual New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center only a month away, a tabulation was made of this year's entries. There will be one picture each from Russia, Spain, Japan, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Belgium, two from Italy and France, and four from Czechoslovakia, which has lately become a hotbed for avant-garde films (TIME, July 29). Fine, but how many were entries from Hollywood, which makes movies-that-are-better-than-ever? Answer, as of last week: none.

That was curious indeed, since a supporter of the New York Festival is the Motion Picture Association of America, the trade association of the major Hollywood studios. What is even curiouser is that eleven domestic pictures were submitted to the Lincoln Center selection committee, and all were rejected as "not of festival caliber." Then it turned out last week that the selectors had tried to get one Hollywood picture, The Fortune Cookie (with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau), only to be turned down by the distributor, United Artists. That prompted Cookie's producerdirector, Billy Wilder, to suggest that United Artists was "scared of the snobbish, intellectual types of audiences and critics" in New York. "After all," he quipped, "my picture was not made in Czechoslovakia."

The truth is that for all their public plumping in behalf of U.S. representation in film competitions, U.A. and the other M.P.A.A. members are privately wary of festival juries and reviewers. The festivals are concerned with artistic values, the studios with commercial ones. Even if a Hollywood entry should be praised by festival press previewers, the distributors fear that the papers would give the film less attention later on, when it counts—in its general release. "Festivals are fine," sums up one studio executive, "for Polish, Russian and Czech companies. They have nothing to lose and a great deal to gain."

But there are many film makers who believe that international festival com petition is the only way that the U.S. cinema can hope to improve its quality. Hollywood Producer Robert Radnitz, who was a panel member at last year's New York Festival, thought it was "a great festival. The most exciting thing was the number of young people who came, despite the high ticket prices. If kids will go out and pay that much money to see foreign films, it drives another nail into the coffin of the Hollywood syndrome of catering to the twelve-year-old mind that even twelve-year-olds never had."