THE CINEMA
" Portrait of Maria." At the Ritz.—" You Only Live Once." Revived at the London Pavilion.
THE sleuthing type of cinema-goer, if he can penetrate the queues besieging the Empire to enjoy the celluloid variety turns chosen from beyond the grave by the spirit of Ziegfeld (ethereally imper- sonated by Mr. William Powell), will find in the humble cinema next door a less ordinary experience. For here is a Mexican film. Portrait of Maria is the second of the M.G.M. " foreign " films for international distribution, and although the production is less ambitious and the theme less topical than we enjoyed in The Last Chance, both producer and distributor are to be congratulated on this second demonstration that cameras do not refuse to function outside the territories of the Great Powers. Portrait of Maria shows Hollywood influence in the construction of _the story, and American dialogue has been substituted for the original, but theme and treatment remain simple, sensitive and honest. Criticism of the plot as over-naïve I find unjust. A young Mexican-Indian maiden and her fiance want to marry, but have no money, and are prevented by the villagers from making a living because the girl's mother was a prostitute. The young man steals and goes to jail, and the girl poses for a friendly painter and is denounced for this innocent piece of supposed immorality. And so, like her mother before her, she is stoned to death by the enraged villagers. Here is surely a simple tragedy of intolerance, displaying virtues of form seldom to be found in the over-ornate conventidnality of the usual screen story with its formally prescribed twists and turns! The story is set not in the traditional screen Mexico of arid cactus-bearing plains, but in a valley of tall, delicate poplars and calm rivers, where garlands of flowers grace the most humdrum objects. In one magnificent scene the villagers, in a tumultuous army, conduct to church their • beasts and domestic pets, all ridiculously garlanded for the " feast of the small animals." In the camera's excursions on the river we move past boats covered in exotic blooms and beneath ornamental arches hidden under the same gay covering. And against this back- ground the hopeless love of the grave and handsome man and maid and the easily aroused hatred of their flower-loving neighbours becomes horribly credible. The crowds pouring through village streets, the portraits of Indian and peon seen singly or in beautifully composed groups--all these give the film outstanding quality.
" You Only Live Once," first shown before the war, reminds us of the earlier works of Mr. Fritz Lang, whose latest successes include " The Woman in the Window" and "Scarlet Street." It is sad to see from what high social purposes Mr. Lang's technical mastery has now been diverted. In " You Only Live Once" he tells a tale of intolerance which ,hows curious similarities with the theme of "Portrait of Maria." His heroine and hero, played by Miss Sylvia Sydney and—most brilliantly—by Mr. Henry Fonda, _are the victims of a nation-wide man-hunt reaching fanaticism in the blind conviction of " once a crook, always a crook." The attack upon American hypocrisy and intolerance has lost some of its impact by reason of subsequent and more horrible evils overseas ; but the film is brilliantly made, and achieves moments of intolerable suspense and sharp emotion by means at once simpler and more effective than those commonly employed in the over-sophisticated crime films
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