The Cinema "Second Bureau." At the Curzon. — "Sans Famille."
At the Academy ONE is inclined to exaggerate the value of another country's films, just as much as of its fiction, for only the selected few reach us. Those who think of the French cinema in terms of Clair and a few super-realists may learn a salutary lesson this week. "
Second Bureau is a rather dull film, a long packed melodrama of the French and German secret services. It begins brilliantly enough with shots of blossoming trees and pastoral landscape, a trench in a field filled with yapping, snapping dogs of every breed (one dachshund sits aloof with an air of melancholy poetic foresight), four men in lounge suits wearing gas masks and carrying small attaché cases. One of them takes a bomb out of his case and throws it, the gas fumes spread, the field flowers wither, a pigeon falls dead from the sky, the yapping rises agonisingly and subsides, a single bark. and three grotesque masked men gather round the fourth with congratulations. The film, alas ! does not maintain this sinister and satiric level. Two secrets stolen from the Germans, a double-crossing agent, a motor chase, a beautiful woman spy who falls in love with the secret service officer she has been sent to trap, two murders and an attempted suicide : the film is too thick with drama. The clever atmo- sphere of routine destruction in the opening sequence is quite lost.
It is a great pity, for what an amusing film of the secret service could be made if the intention was satiric and not romantic, the treatment realistic and not violent. One remembers Mr. Maugham's Ashenden bored at Geneva, his official existence " as orderly and monotonous as a city clerk's," and Mr. Compton Mackenzie's office in Athens. There is a moment in Second Bureau when the French officer watching the German woman in the hotel lounge thinks of her with a handkerchief over her eyes bound to a post. This is an example of the film's unnecessary melodrama. After all it is peace time. There is no reason why anybody should suffer more than a few years' imprison- ment, and isn't there material enough in that ? In the man who sketches near a dockyard and is arrested in a suburban teashop and put away for a couple of years ? The true drama is the lack of drama, the pettiness of the actual climax against the background of arming nations, the meagreness of the information to be stolen, the smallness of the money earned, the unimportance of the agent. Second Bureau gains nothing by its violence because there is no room to make the violence convincing. One enjoys parts of the filin for their touches of truth, not the acting of the stars but of M. Pierre Larqucy as the silly pathetic under-officer Colleret, who is ruined by the spy, with his spray of cheap scent, his childish boasts and humble love ; of M. Jean-Max as the double-crossing agent, an exiled Russian, a bored womaniser full of a self-pity for the past, a self-pity as mechanical as the gallantry.
Sans Famille, directed with deadly seriousness, is very funny indeed. It is the story of how Lady Milligan's baby is kidnapped at the instigation of her wicked brother-in-law so that he may inherit her property, her husband having just died. It is a bad bargain because immediately after the child has disappeared she tells him she is expecting /in autre enfant. lie means the child to be murdered, but the kid- napper instead takes it across the Channel and leaves it on the steps of Notre Dame. The boy is adopted by peasants and. then by a strolling singer, once a famous operatic star, who dies in a snowstorm, of which the constituent featheiN arc only too visible. The child makes his way to an appallingly foggy London and the arms of his mother. The chief fun is provided by the London police. They chase juvenile offenders with drawn trunch...ons, but even when they are inactive there is something sabtly wrong about them. They are small men with sloping shoulders and enormous helmets which fall low over their eyes, and they have a dumb beaten- dog air as they creep through -the thick fog past public houses where the London burglars dance apache dances with their
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