From [London] Daily Express, May 24, 1935.
“I am prouder that a magazine printed a two-verse poem of mine, for which they paid me fifteen dollars, many years ago, than I am of any film I have made.”
So says great director, conversationalist, and arch-sentimentalist Griffith, who reached the Savoy [Hotel, London] from far places last night.
“The movie is not an art,” says Griffith. “It is a beautiful business. So transient it cannot endure for a year. Why, the greatest films of the greatest masters of movie, made five years ago, shown today look ridiculous. I haven’t made a film myself that can endure. Words, painting, sculpture last.”
It is three years since the greatest made a picture. When he goes to the cinema now, which is rarely, he finds that the masters of the talkie art are just creeping up to the standard of photographic ingenuity again that he had perfected a decade ago. Talk has made the whole thing so simplified.
He has come to London to see about the making of his famous silent film Broken Blossoms into a modern talkie. He doesn’t know as yet whether he will direct it himself.
“After all,” says [Griffith], “a shadow’s a shadow …”