CINEMA
,4 A Woman o' Distinction." (Odeen.)---g, Father of the Bride." (Empire.)---a Night and the City." (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion.) I HAVE led a very sheltered life it is true, but during the whole course of it I have never met a woman who (a) turned a hose on to herself by mistake, (b) got her chiffon scarf tied up in the works of a moving car, (c) stood on a chair in a hairdressing establishment thus trapping her pinafore in the electric fan and ending up on the floor buried in the drying machine, (d) was plastered with mud by a gentleman, (e) hit people in the face with her handbag, (f) broke a window by slamming the door, (g) became enmeshed in a venetian blind. By the same token I have never met—and I do not believe anybody off the variety stage has either—a man whose bicycle disintegrated completely beneath him.
In A Woman of Distinction. however, Miss Rosalind Russell, that arch-priestess of elegance and haughty sophistication, and Mr. Ray Milland, who is a very good actor, are asked to indulge in all these slapstick acrobatics. The embarrassment, both on and off the screen, is huge. I know of no more grievous waste of talent This is a very foolish film about a dean of a girls' college and a visiting English astronomer, and though on occasions there are expressions of verbal wit, they are as brief-lived as butterflies.
Miss Russell may stand, for an instant, looking seductive in white chiffon or dignified in grey tweed, and then some violent catastrophe befalls her person, and she is drenched, nearly throttled or, quite simply, falls over. Really, one is racked with pity.
Familiar to all engaged couples and their parents is the initial desire to have a simple wedding with just a few friends, a desire which, in the space of a few days, gratefully cedes place to the conventional hysteria and the ordering of two marquees and a ten-tiered cake. Father, of the Bride is the American counterpart to Quiet Wedding, with Mr. Spencer Tracy, usually embroiled in sorrowful happenings, as the father, Miss Joan Bennet as the mother and Miss Elizabeth Taylor as the bride. The film is extremely well directed by Mr. Vincente Minnelli, who keeps a busy sardonic eye on all the details of this pagan ritual, never allowing them to become farcical but noting their dear absurdities in a definite, if kindly, manner. With Mr. Tracy acting as superbly in comedy as he does in more serious sagas, we have as pleasant a piece of light- heartedness as has graced the screen for some time.
Extraordinarily good too is Night and the City, a picture about a super-spiv, played superlatively well by Mr. Richard Widmark with almost as much pathos as unpleasantness against a background of wrestlers and. nightclub queens. Miss Gene Tierney, Miss Googie Withers and Messrs. Francis Sullivan, Herbert Lom and Hugh Marlowe give him both solid and sensitive support, and there is a magnificent perfofrnance by M. Zbyszko as an aged wrestler. To Mr. Jules Dassin, who has directed this contemporary tragedy with peculiar insight and imagination, must be given the greater portion of praise, for he has turned Mr. Gerald Kersh's story of London's underworld into a profound study of weakness and greed. Mr. Widmark, hysterically over-excited, always " on-. to a good thing," braggart, coward and in the end murderer by proxy, follows his director's pointing finger with the confident steps of a true actor. His is a memorable performance: VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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