CINEMA
"Macbeth." (Cameo-Polytechnic.)—“Laughter in Paradise." (Plan.) MR. ORSON WELLES is the only practising director who obstinately refuses to conform to the commercial pattern and who seems definitely to prefer sticking out his neck at an angle of his own choosing rather than giving the public what it wants. Like Mr. Erich von Stroheim who made films lasting all day but would not allow them to be dut, he has no regard for anything save the expressing of his awn highly individualistic views on a subject and cares not a tittle for our opinions. Such integrity must surely be applauded, particularly when, in the case of Macbeth. Mr. Welles must have been aware from the outset that his ideas would pulverise Shakespearians and bore Grableites to death.
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For those who know their Macbeth well his lacerations of the text will be intolerable, and for those who merely classify it as a black tragedy with some familiar purple passages it will be too black and not purple enough. It does, indeed, take place almost entirely-- in the dark, in a Scotland so dripping and so misty, so abounding in disused mineshafts and mildewed monoliths, that even ,those who have no love for Caledonia will feel aggrieved. Nevertheless, though the words are mangled, the delivery of them in pseudo- Scottish accents poor, and the settings troglodytic, the picture has moments of unusual beauty. Mr. Welles's camera work has always been excellent, and here, especially when his, if not Shakespeare's, script calls.for action, he produces a number of vivid and stimu- lating scenes ; scenes which, dissolving in strange unearthly patterns into the mists, or looming darkly over bleak skylines, linger in the memory long afterwards. Bored, shocked or amazed as one may be, one cannot dismiss this version of Macbeth as "a tale told by an idiot . . . signifying nothing," because one can never repudiate the. fruits of an original mind. Everything Mr. Welles touches has a quality of excitement about it. It is always interesting, never insipid, and it has the rare virtue of arousing in every breast a sensation of some sort.
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Although Laughter in Paradise is slow in ripening, it is a delightful• comedy, full of juicy plums. It relates how four people, Miss Fay Compton and Messrs. Alastair Sim, Guy Middleton, and George Cole, are left large fortunes by a practical joker if they perform a range of distasteful tasks stipulated in his will—Miss Compton to be a domestic servant, Mr. Sim to commit a felony and get gaoled for it, Mr. Cole to hold up his bank manager and Mr. Middleton to marry the first girl he speaks to. Written by Mr. Jack Davies and Mr. Michael Pertwee and directed by Mr. Mario Zampi, the picture provides us with some precious moments of exquisite folly, notably in the hands of Mr. Sim, who, with the incomparable Miss Joyce Grenfell as his W.A.A.F. fiancée, takes us nearest of all to Paradise. His vain efforts to get caught shop- lifting are nothing short of archangelic. The pace is, unfortunately, on the torpid side, and Mr. Zampi would have done well to use his scissors more zealously, but this does not prevent a good quota of entertainment from seeping through and eventually sub-
merging the longueurs. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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