Charles Laughton Wrath" (US title "The Beachcomber") (1938), based on a story by W. Somerset Maugham, in which his wife, Elsa Lanchester, co-starred; "St. Martin's Lane" (US title "Sidewalks of London"), about London street entertainers, which featured Vivien Leigh and Rex Harrison; and "Jamaica Inn", with Maureen O'Hara and Robert Newton, about Cornish shipwreckers, based on Daphne du Maurier's novel, and the last film Alfred Hitchcock directed in Britain before moving to Hollywood in the late 1930s. The films produced were not commercially successful enough, and the company was saved from bankruptcy only when RKO Pictures offered Laughton the title role (Quasimodo)
Monte Verità used to house sun-bathers at the Sanatorium; and a building housing the panoramic painting "The Clear World of the Blessed", by Elisar von Kupffer. The hill is also the site of a tea garden and Japanese teahouse. A fictionalized version of the colony at Monte Verità is the subject of a short story named "Monte Verità" by the Cornish author Daphne du Maurier which appeared in "The Apple Tree" published in 1952, and then republished under the name "The Birds and Other Stories". A.S. Byatt's 2009 novel "The Children's Book" mentions the colony, as does Robert Dessaix's 1996 novel "Night