CINEMA
Decameron Nights. (Odeon, Marble Arch.)—Women of Twilight. (Plaza.) EVERY time I see that one of .the classics has been filmed I confess to a certain sadness, for, owing to a distaste for literature in my youth, the odds are heavily against my -having read it. Not that I think a mind absolutely devoid of pr( judice is at all a bad thing to take to a film, but I mourn the g Aden opportunity for making odious comparisons. I imagine that most people have read Boccaccio's famous stories in some 'form or another—usually a bowdlerised form suitable for innocent children—and it grieves me that I, who have never read one of them, should be unable to stir myself into a passion of rage over the manifest iniquities of Decameron Nights. - For obviously there is something wrong here. My unbiased opinion, which history refutes, is that .Boccacca? was the dullest, dreariest story-teller ever. to be born. Three of his tales, told in a wealth of colour with the minimum of acting ability and a triteness of script past believing, are proffered for our enter- tainment, and I can truly say that I fail to remember an occasion more steeped in boredom.
- Miss Joan Fontaine, Sir Godfrey Tearle, Mr Louis Jourdan and Miss Binnie Barnes grapple with a dialogue so flat, so utterly lacking in shape or shade that it is like listening to a dynamo. The effect is overpoweringly soporific. Out of a coma of tedium I watched the gyrations of the unhappy players, puppets dressed in pastel shades of a Neopolitan-ice flavour, mouthing platitudes, and for the first time in my life as a film-critic I as near as a whisker fell asleep. But if I had read Boccaccio I should, perhaps, have had the more stimulating experience of being furiously angry. .
Women of Twilight, adapted from Miss Rayman's play, is _very different fare. It concerns itself in a stealthily melodramatic way with baby-farming, Miss Freda Jackson running a boarding-house for unmarried mothers and dealing, in a refined manner, wan every- thing disreputable from blackmail to murder. Miss Eckson is an old hand at the silky sinister, the velvet vile, and as tisull she is admirably alarming. Her wickedness seeps through her mask of virtue like dampness throngp a newly painted wall; her every sweetness is threaded with a shiver. The unfortunate g rls who have been driven to her door, by a callous society are tt►e Misses Rene Ray, Lois Maxwell, Joan Dowing, Dora Bryan, ing•.borg Wells, Mary Germaine and Dorothy Gordon, and they cover a wide field of virtuosity. Pick of the sadly soled bunch is Miss Hope, whose mixture of slovenliness, venality and stalwart p:libisophy makes a solid Cockney pictureTew can.ault. Miss Bryan, of course,
is never allowed to be anything but pert, common and warmhearted, but as I carry a torch high for this characterisation of hers I do not really want to know if she can be anything else. Miss Ray provides the tragic element in this little firmament of misfortune, and she steers a steady course round a number of emotional hazards guaranteed to upset frailer craft.
What with bed-bugs and dirty teacups, what with one baby dying of neglect and news of another buried in the garden, what with Miss Ray's lover being hanged for murder and Miss Gordon being mentally deficient, this film has all the ingredients of a Grand Guignol, but, being underplayed, in the true English fashion, and quietly directed by Mr. Gordon Parry, it has turned out to be a seemingly plausible record of man's inhumanity to woman and a
Previous page
