Cinema
The Man Under St. Paul's
By ISABEL QUIGLY The Doctor's Dilemma. (War- ner.) — Warlock. (Odeon, Marble Arch.) 'Do not try to live for ever. You will not succeed,' seems the only indubitably true re- when to die, and who ought to, is another matter, and the subject of Shaw's crankiest piece of stage polemics. This has now been transferred to the screen with enormous style by Anatole de Grun- wald (producer and script writer, pretty closely after Shaw) and Anthony Asquith (director).
The particular dilemma of the play is one that comes up, theoretically at least, pretty often in modern life : a circular argument something like Mr. Philip Toynbee's recent poser about Lolita, St. Paul's Cathedral, and the man pinned under- neath it. Should you destroy St. Paul's Cathedral if it meant saving a single life? Should you, given the choice, destroy a morally despicable great artist (with a St. Paul's latent in him) or a morally admirable non-artist? That a great artist may be morally despicable is another of those circular questions involving art and morality, the nature and importance of them both; and Shaw, the most indefatigable mouse that ever danced entertain- ingly round his own wheel of paradox and con- jecture, never answered it. An artist and a moralist himself, and both at a fiery level of conviction, he must have had a dilemmaed time of it himself.
To me the film's big surprise is Dirk Bogarde's portrayal of Louis Dubedat. For years this intel- ligent actor has been condemned to play wet, glum heroes without the smallest bite or humour, and achieved the sort of 'pop' reputation that looked like condemning him to look wan and wistful for ever. In Louis Dubedat he has his revenge on every role of the sort he ever played—for what would seem to epitomise the Bogarde hero better than this brilliant consumptive, who actually dies on the screen? He plays the part with a hectic high spirits that really convinces one he is (a) dying, and taking a final kick at life while he has the chance; (b) morally impossible, as we and the doctors soon know; and (c) likely to raise the sort of devotion Jennifer has for him. He achieves this though Shaw and romantic love are temperamen- tally so irreconcilable that no amount of cunning, or even touching persuasion, can move one to believe in Shaw's words of love : the single exchange of such words between Louis and his wife has been turned into a love scene in the film because of the way the pair behave and look—the effect of reading the same scene is totally different.
Anyway, with M r. Bogarde convincing as roman- tic hero phoney and/or genuine, romantic 'cad ditto, and consumptive, all at once, and the always lively and touching Leslie Caron as his Jennifer, the central situation is satisfactory from start to finish. The doctors (Felix Aylmer and Robert Morley especially) have the air of sinisterly fruity enjoyment I feel certain Shaw intended, except for John Robinson in the almost impossible part of Ridgeon, who looks as unhappy as a murderer ought to right from the start before he ever thought of murder. With Cecil Beaton's much- praised designs for Miss Caron's clothes I quarrel; for, with her sculptured hair (treated not so much like hair as like fabric, a flat, smooth sheet to be looped and tied and bundled), they are so obtrusive that they take one's eye and mind too long and too violently off what is happening. If you wanted an electrifying effect on a bored audience, they would do splendidly; but the play is quite electric enough, and Miss Caron quite striking enough, without them. The colours, though, are superb, oranges and browns and olive greens, like counter- panes from one's childhood.
Warlock (director : Edward Dmytryk; `U' certificate) is a fair to middling Western, which, considering it has Henry Fonda, Anthony Quinn, Richard Widmark and Dolores Michaels in it, ought to be rather more than that. Henry Fonda plays a man who hires himself out to lawless com- munities as their marshal, with powers to restore order and the personality, as well as the shooting skill, to do so; Anthony Quinn is a cripple who rides along with him; Richard Widmark a re- formed thug who sets up in moral opposition to the pair of them. The acting is first-rate, the atmosphere tense and adult; yet there is a curious lifelessness about it that makes it, for some reason, a forgettable and not a memorable Western.
Most of last week I spent as part of a jury at the second Harrogate festival of 'Films in the Service of Industry,' a salutary experience rather like that of a publisher who spends most of his days reading fiction and poetry, and is suddenly plumped down in the stockroom for a set time with nothing to read but textbooks and manuals, factual and purely functional stuff to be judged on specific results. In that leisurely watering-place where once (they claim) they could (given the right time of year) whistle up a cabinet meeting at any moment, since every Minister would be found within whistling distance, everyone who came to the festival was in some way connected with films but came from a different direction from everyone else, so that our very separateness and the variety of our reasons for being there reminded anyone who needed to.be reminded of the scope of the film and the long distances it can travel, in intention and in result, from the feature films that are the staple diet of most filmgoers, and even of film critics. There were the indus- trialists, the educationalists, the boffins and tech- nologists and visual-aiders, the PROs from the big firms or agencies that, for one reason or another, make films; and there were seven juries judging films in nine categories with names like Sales Pro- motion for Specialist Audiences or Education and Training Within Industry. The British Transport Commission swept the board, and took six awards out of twenty-five. And we all returned to our separate sorts of film-making or film-seeing, our heads fairly bursting with steelworks and glass- blowing and atomic energy, after a busy busman's holiday, among buses from all sorts of unfamiliar and recondite routes. I am glad to hear that there is talk of expanding it further, and making it an international event.
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