It is difficult not to feel sorry for the police
heroes of these tales as they arrive too late to do anything but give a valedicto- ry' glance at the outcome of murder and mayhem. Their deductive ability is set at naught. Instead, the passions of man bring about their own inevitable retribution. There is, I think, a natural conservatism at the heart of the detective-fiction writer that resents the anti-climax inherent in a life sentence which often means the murderer doing time for as little as ten years. It has led to the emasculation of the police inspector. At least the American private eye shoots the murderer. Film directors are the greatest megalo- maniacs of them all. Film is the 20th centu- ry's most popular form of entertainment, and because of that, its practitioners have always felt terribly insecure about their artistic credentials. Initially, directors hope to succeed as entertainers. But they all end up desperate to be recognised as serious artists. The result is that every director wants to make bigger, longer, and more expensive films. Short films, like miniature paintings, never made anyone into a Great Artist. It is no accident that film is the only contemporary art with a genre self-con- sciously entitled 'epic'.
The only brake on aspiration is money. As Orson Welles said: `to practice his art, a poet needs a pen and a painter a brush. But a film-maker needs an army.' Orson Welles found out the hard way that the army costs a fortune. Few film directors are rich enough to finance their own films, and
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