There are no details known. Basically it's a combination of different factors. His favorite film The Wind was held back for over a year and released with added sound effects and not very successful, while the following films were bread and butter works for the increasingly tightly controlled MGM factory. His Swedish friends left Hollywood in the wake of sound or even before and he himself apparently had great difficulties to adjust to sound, his first US-talkie as well as the following Swedish talkie are quite bad. Apparently he had earned enough money to be financially comfortable, wasn't the youngest, didn't like being a studio hack and said goodbye. Maybe he had some hopes for a successful Swedish career, but his talkie there flopped horribly and he found himself out of demand.Saturnome wrote:I wish there was a neat topic for Victor Sjöström where I could ask this, but I'll post it here I guess : Is there any detailed account about why he left film directing? Was making talkies that bad? Or how he went back to it one last time in the United Kingdom (Under the Red Robe, 1937) ?
He played theater, acted in films and then Korda contacted him in 1935 for a film about Christ in which he invested some energy before the project was cancelled. Korda offered him the swashbuckler as a compensation, but it wasn't a thrilling experience, he described the result as elegant nonsense. And that was his directorial career in films.
You shouldn't forget that he is the only director who made great silents at the very beginning of feature film production (Ingeborg Holm in 1913) and at the end (The Wind in 1928). Maybe sound was one more cumbersome step with which he wasn't willing to bother too much.
