CINEMA "Letter from an Unknown Woman." (Cameo-Polytechnic..)----- " Fanny." (Curzon.)—"
Bitter Springs." (Gaumon and Marble Arch Pavilion.) AT last in the West End, after a mysterious initial exile in the suburbs, is Letter from an Unknown Woman, a sadly, sweetly sentimental—and wholly engaging—essay in Viennese nostalgia, made in Hollywood by the German director Max Opuls. This is a film in which style is all, for we know the story, or stories uncommonly like it, off by heart, and all the clichés and conventions that go with it. Miss Joan Fontaine is the girl who falls in love with a musician, spends one night with him, and bears his child. To her the seduction is the crown, the flower, of her life ; to him it is another agreeable episode. He-goes away ; she marries ; when they meet again, by chance, her new, rich secure world falls about her ears, but he fails to recognise her, save as another lovely woman to pursue.
Mr. Louis Jourdan is all that his part calls for—dissipated, hand- some, with the charm becoming more automatic as the years go by—but Miss Fontaine is more than all. She plays the shy girl of fifteen as convincingly as the composed and lovely woman of thirty, and her sensitiveness to the delicacy a story like this demands irradiates the whole film ; not a gesture, not a word is overplayed.
The French film Fanny is also about a lover who leaves his lass to bear his child alone, but this is robust and down-to-earth after the grace and style of the Hollywood film. It owes its distinction not to MM. Pagnol and Allegret, who produced and directed it, but to the late Raimu's performance as the father of the faithless lover—a performance full of Provetval mirth, good living, quick choler and the superb exaggeration of every wisp of feeling. Hint, simply, to M. Raimu that his sailor son once knew a man who was wrongly thought to have typhus, and he suffers immediately the very pangs of plague himself, portraying fo' his café companions the swollen tongue, the distended frame, the starting eyes of the dying man. It is a richly comic performance in a film that shifts a little uneasily between comedy and melodrama, coming down on the wrong side at last, and with a sickening thud. But we shall have no new films with Raimu in them, and those who snatch at every chance of seeing him can see him here at just about his splendid best.
The one recent British film is another of Ealing Studios' excursions. It has authentic qualities of its own. Mr. Chips Rafferty is trekking his home and his herds into new territory ; he clashes with aborigines at the only water-hole within miles ; he learns that it is best in a new country for the white man to compromise and co-operate with the black. The film is slow after the sweep and swing of American westerns ; the white men are out-acted by the black ; and Mr. Tommy Trinder, badly served by the script-writer, is out-comedianed by an antic kangaroo. But the story has a sincerity that goes well with the screen's sense of space. It never quite excites, but it never
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