time he reached New York the project had already fallen through and he went straight on to Hollywood where several studios were interested in employing him. He made his first American film for Universal Studios, The Flame of New Orleans (1941), but it was such a commercial failure that for a time Clair's career as a director was in the balance. After more than a year's delay, his next film was I Married a Witch (1942), followed by It Happened Tomorrow (1944), both of which did respectably well, and then And Then There Were None (1945), which turned out to be an exceptional commercial success despite being perhaps the least personal of his Hollywood ventures. Each of Clair's American films was made for a different studio. In 1941 Clair was stripped of his French citizenship by the Vichy government, though this was later reversed. It was also in 1941 that he learned of the death of his brother Henri Chomette in France from polio. In 1943, he was planning to go to Algeria to organise the Service Cinématographique de l'Armée, but funding for the project was withdrawn just as he was on the point of departure. In July 1945 he went back to France for a short visit, and then returned finally in July 1946, having signed a contract with RKO for his next film to be made in France. Clair's American exile had allowed him to develop his characteristic vein of ironical fantasy with several commercially successful films, but there was some feeling that it had been at the expense of personal control and that his output there had not matched the quality of his earlier work in France. Clair himself recognised that being employed by the highly organized American studios had allowed him to work in ideal circumstances: "In spite of the restrictions of the American system, it is possible, if one wishes, to take responsibility. In my four Hollywood films I managed to do what I wanted." 1947–1965 Clair's first film on his return to France was the romantic comedy Le silence est d'or (Silence is Golden) (1947), which was set in 1906 and nostalgically evoked the world of early French film-making; its plot also created variations on Molière's L'École des femmes. Clair considered it one of his best post-war films. Literary inspirations also underpinned other films: Faust for La Beauté du diable (Beauty and the Devil)