Rene Clair’s “American period is generally blamed for his decline,” Andrew Sarris notes in The American Cinema, before averring that said decline began before he “left Paris for Hollywood’s lucre.” Could it then be fairer to say that after the likes of ‘23’s Paris Qui Dort, ‘27’s The Italian Straw Hat, ‘31’s Le Million, and ‘32’s A Nous La Liberte (which influenced Chaplin), the director, who practiced a brand of surrealism-with-slapstick tinted by a particularly Gallic delicacy and whimsy, ran out of innovations and henceforth had to fall back on mere wit?The fact of the matter is, 1935’s The Ghost Goes West, Clair’s first English-language film—not a Hollywood production but a British-based Alexander Korda one, with sets by Vincent and a script by Clair and Robert E. Sherwood—doesn’t bear much of a resemblance to the Clair films that came before it.
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