THE CINEMA
" Bedelia." At the Plaza.—" New York's Night Club Boom " (•‘ March of Time "). General Release.
WHEN we first meet Bedelia she is in a jeweller's shop in Monte Carlo. She has just had a large black pearl set in a ring and is being watched with a great deal of attention by a young painter. In fact he watches her with a great deal more interest than I could summon up throughout the first half of the film. He even follows her to Yorkshire where she settles down with her doting husband. By this time we all know that Bedelia has a Past. This is all too clearly established in sequence after ponderous sequence. Somewhere about the middle of the film it becomes clear that our heroine has contracted a dangerously criminal, habit and that she is about to put it into practice yet once more. The rest of the story is concerned with the young man's efforts, rather half-hearted ones to my mind, to prevent her doing this. As by the time we reach this point he has irritated everyone intensely, including, I suspect, the audience, he is unable to warn the husband very convincingly and can only go on painting his extremely tedious pictures. At the end of the film Bedelia makes a fatal blunder and commits suicide. I have purposely refrained from telling you the nature of Bedelia's crime as I can assure you that it is practically impossible to sit through the first half of the film if you know what it is. Only the faint hope that she might have once been a midget or a Tattooed Lady could have kept me in even a faint state of anticipation. In fact I would have refrained from mentioning the film at all if it did not raise certain interesting scripting points. First of all the film is well acted. Ian Hunter, making a welcome return to the screen, presents us with an excellent study of the devoted and deluded husband. Margaret Lockwood, warming up after a slow start, is very good in the final sequence, and Ann Crawford gives a pleasantly natural performance as •the faithful secretary. Barry K. Barnes, as the painter, is perhaps a little more impassive than is entirely necessary, but then nobody has provided him with a character to play. The minor parts are well done, the lighting is excellent and the direction is good—when the script gives it a chance. Unfortunately, the script is almost relent- less in its determination to give no one the faintest opportunity to do anything except make us disbelieve the whole thing.
It was to be hoped that dialogue of the "Do you take salt?"— " No, but I take mustard " variety had been banished. That people talking different languages would be consistent and would not indulge m the "Que c'est beau. I've never seen such an exquisite setting. Au revoir. Good-bye, Monsieur " lingual salad type of speech, and that finally film stories should be told in pictures and not in dialogue.
I know that good script-writers are scarce but with British films on the threshold of a great future we cannot afford to make even one film based on such clumsy writing. Bedelia's first cousin Laura found a much more improbable and fundamentally less interesting story no problem at all, and entertained us all mightily. But then she had a most taut and excellent script and, incidentally, a much less silly and hideous wardrobe.
I am not sure whether New York's Night Club Boom, the latest March of Time release, was originally intended to present such a damaging picture of New York night-life as has actually emerged. Perhaps the director of the film developed a jaundiced eye for his subject during the course of what must have been a formidable series of expeditions with his camera crews to all the more spectacular of Manhattan's night clubs. To judge from the film, the inhabitants of these would-be-gay establishments are the inconsolably unhappy victims of a whole series of rackets and deceptions. Rarely have so many unprepossessing people appeared on the screen in so short a
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