CINEMA
The Dark Page. (New Gallery.)
As the Spectator goes to press earlier this week, I can only review this one film, half a double-feature programme at the New Gallery, the second half of which is a French comedy called All Roads Lead to Rome, starring M. Gerard Philipe and Mlle Micheline Presle. As I am on the subject of films that I have not seen, there will also be. over Easter, Rancho Notorious at the Odeon with Miss Marlene Dietrich carousing with the backroom boys in a wild western saloon ; and at the Plaza those popular comedians Martin and Lewis in a film called That's my BO. That fate has forced me to miss this latter offering is a source of great joy to me. However good it was, I should not like it.
Now, as to The Dark Page, it is one of those slick fierce movies about newspaper tycoons, a large proportion of the dialogue of which is extremely hard to follow, what with everyone having to get the paper out on time and therefore speaking in a sort of second- saving code. The story is excellent. Mr. Broderick Crawford plays the part of the editor of a scandal sheet, and, when he is faced with a wife he deserted years before who threatens to wreck his career, he murders her. A young reporter, Mr. John Derek, the editor's ewe-lamb, inspired by his boss's love for the sensational, gets on the trail of the killer, and it is Mr. Crawford's unhappy lot to have to print in tall headlines clues which will eventually lead to him.
Directed by Mr. Phil Karlson, the picture moves with rather too much speed and with what I hope is not too much accuracy. The behaviour of its reporters to the bereaved and downtrodden is of a callousness past comprehension, and its hero is so unsympathetic a character as to be nearly sub-human. And yet, in addition to filling one with a warm flood of pleasure at not being an American news correspondent, the film is also dramatic and holds the attention unwaveringly throughout—like a street accident.
And now for those chocolate eggs tied up in blue ribbon, the naps after luncheon, the long walks in a freezing wind, the books, the flowers, the dreaming—and the cinema, of course !
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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