ABSTRACT
Baxter had no knowledge of films when he first went to the tiny studio which was so ambitiously named Sound City. At Sound City Baxter was the casting director, responsible for the choosing of players, and the gathering together of the ‘crowd’ or ‘extra’ artists. The film opened with scenes of horses ploughing against a background of high white clouds. For Baxter, George Robey starred in Birds of a Feather, adapted from the novel A Rift in the Loot. Of the major British comedies of the thirties none was more successful than Alexander Korda’s triumphant The Private Life of Henry the Eighth. Similarly, in John Baxter’s more modest The Small Man a group of shopkeepers threatened with extinction by a chain store get together and go to London to meet the haughty business chiefs who are threatening their private enterprise.
