CINEMA
In her prime
ROBERT CUSHMAN
A Star is Born (Warner, 'A') Silence and Cry (Academy One, 'A') Carry on Camping (Metropole, 'A') Though one accepted that it was only a matter of brief time before the advent of Judy Garland Memorial Seasons, the rap- idity with which the Warner has screened A Star is Born has, if only because of the implications of the title, something ghoulish about it. But the picture is a good example of Hollywood on Hollywood, distinguished by a brilliant performance from James Mason as the failing, immensely sympathetic star whose decline throws a hard if indirect light on the Garland legend itself.
And there is, of course, the spectacle of that legend visibly shaping itself into its last phase; not yet a public suffering-machine but a display, alternately tender and fero- cious, of aggressive vulnerability; her brav- ura matches Mason's cool, although, in act- ing terms, his is the victory. Hers, however, is the film because hers are the songs, tailored for her by Harold Arlen, staged with a cleanness of line which even then was becoming rare in film musicals, and finding her at her precarious peak (it was gone almost immediately). She sardonically disposes of a dozen production-number clichés in 'Someone at Last' (she also dis- penses a good few in the earlier 'Born in a Trunk', but the self-mockery wins through and was to become the saving grace of her cabaret act), strokes through a ballad with a gentleness of which one had forgotten she was capable, and negotiates the tricky turns of 'The Man that Got Away' with a wry power newly discovered and not yet abused.
All the same, it will be a pity if, as seems likely, this film becomes Garland's per- manent monument, embellished only by an occasional backward glance over the rain- bow. For one thing, considering that it was written by Moss Hart and directed by George Cukor, it is remarkably unfunny, and Garland should be remembered largely as a clown.
My view of Garland as a comic is perhaps a biased one; my earliest movie memory is Easter Parade and of her cavorting with Fred Astaire as tramps—'we're a couple of swells.' She is probably the only one of his partners to have outshone him; the sheer glee in impersonation is overwhelming. I re- member a pouting version of 'I Cried for You' sung in Babes in Arms to an absent Mickey Rooney with tongue most delicately balanced in cheek; some agile juxtapositions of mask and face in Minnelli's remarkably complex The Pirate, culminating, as suits my case, in the injunction (shared with Gene Kelly) to be a clown; and a scene in The Harvey Girls where, lured to the Wild West by a forged love-letter, she turns on her tormentor with the stumbling prophecy (I quote strictly from memory): 'One day the West will be free of men like you who kill people and rob banks and write letters to young girls.' Again the absurdity is beautifully judged; it was nice to read in Cukor's obituary tribute that she was a woman of considerable wit, and that such effects were not accidental.
And so to Miklos Jancso's Silence and Cry. As a story it is virtually im- penetrable; as an evocation of a terrain under police rule (Hungary, 1919) it is bleakly convincing. Memory settles on a farmyard, a far from ox corral around which the peasantry are herded as if this were a Western and they were the cattle. The camera has as little mercy as the gend- armerie: 'Rabbit jumps' is the command from an officer to an offending subordinate and we move laterally away from him leav- ing him, presumably, rabbit-jumping to the end of time. The struggle and its vicious aftermath have corrupted both sides equally, and the protagonist, plotting a course between them, is left with only a stony kind of integrity, ultimately meaning- less. So, at least, I think but at the end he is held in a frozen frame long enough for you to make up your own mind.
A word for Carry on Camping, not the best of the series but boasting a surpris- ingly vicious duo from Terry Scott and Betty Marsden. The camping, I'll have you know, is done on a proper site, in tents.
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