" ELEPHANT BOY."
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Mr. Graham Greene enjoys a wide reputation as the most acute and reliable film critic in this country. It was therefore something of a shock to read his review of Flaherty's Elephant Boy, in which he does less than justice to one of the most important figures in the Cinema today.
Mr. Greene should by now be capable of distinguishing between the function of the producer and the function of the director. Instead, he blames Robert Flaherty for everything which was not his responsibility, but Alexander Korda's.
The conflict between so personal an art as Flaherty's and the demands (possibly justifiable) of executives with an eye on the box-office raises an honest and genuine problem. Korda preferred to add to Flaherty's own genius the co-directorial work of Zoltan Korda, and to shoot extra sequences at Denham As producer, he no doubt had his own good reasons for doing so, and he also had every right to do so.
If Mr. Greene feels—as many may feel—that the resulting compromise is a disappointment, let him direct his able invective in the right quarters. It is quite unfair to blame Flaherty for this state of affairs.
One point more. Does Mr. Greene seriously believe that the sum total of Flaherty's work in India consists of " a scene of elephants washed in a river, a few shots of markets and idols and forest " ? I am perfectly certain that if Mr. Greene were to see privately—and I hasten to add that I have not—all the scenes taken in Mysore, he would prefer to rewrite his review with a little more respect for Flaherty's unique feeling for cinema, his depth of human understanding, and, let.me emphati- cally add, his intense personal sincerity.—Yours, &c.,
Previous page
