THE CINEMA
Caesar and Cleopatra." At the Odeon, Marble Arch.—" Intoler- ance." At the New London Film Society.
A WALK down Wardour Street is a healthy experience in so far as the sight of small boys lugging tins of film from office to office serves to remind us that the film industry is basically a matter of rolls of celluloid. Posters may scream their competing claims from window to window but one pile of tins looks very much like another and the men who load the vans are as rough with the million pound epic as with the cheapest and nastiest quota-quickie. My point is that amidst all the economic excitements attending the long-awaited arrival of Mr. Gabriel Pascal's Caesar and Cleopatra it is as well to remember that this too is a film. By the vast majority of its ultimate audience it will be judged as such, without reference to the million and a quarter pounds it is said to have cost or to the crafts- men's time and the studio space it has so long monopolised. I do not say it is irrelevant that this film was intended to help capture the American market. I argue merely that the American market cannot even be threatened until we cease to need a constant stream of American tins rolling down Wardour Street to satisfy the demands of our own cinemas. We need British quality overseas but we also need British quantity at home, and the two requirements are not necessarily incompatible: the best films are rarely the most expensive.
So it comes back to a question of what Mr. Pascal has put in the tin. To begin with I found his film entertaining enough to belie its long running time. The colour is generally good and Oliver Messel's sets excellent. The film is well acted, particularly by Vivien Leigh who almost single-handed gives the production what- major quality it achieves. In short I found Caesar and Cleopatra to be an above average, yet unsensational, even ordinary, film. Even the technical weaknesses, for example, in editing, and in an occasional failure to utilise the camera with imagination, are commonplace enough to be forgivable. The reason the film fails to achieve more is simply that Mr. Shaw's play is thin. It is more static and less suited to the cinema than either Pygmalion or Major Barbara. It is wordy and with a wordiness of the head rather than the heart. The dialogue is clever without being profound and the theme, that greatness may lie in common sense, is scarcely sufficient to carry a full-length work (and how inappropriate to this film version which has an overtone, not of common sense but of romantic spectacle).
How is it that Mr. Rank setting out to reach the world with the international language of the film should twice have committed so large an expenditure to subjects which stand or fall by an apprecia- tion of the English language? Both Henry V and Caesar and Cleopatra are confined by the parochialism of words, and cinemagoers —at any rate the great mass whose support Mr. Rank must enlist— are not students or even lovers of literature.
Compare Intolerance made in 1916 and revived this week by the New London Film Society. No film has ever contained more techni- cal and thematic experiment. Yet Mr. Griffith had no truck with fine words. He dealt in simple ideas and emotions as recognisable in Patagonia as in Kensington. So long as his ideas and emotions were simple the rest could be as extravagant as the camera could compass. Without knowing that he was making an epic which would not be equalled in thirty years he combined in one film the story of the Crucifixion, the Fall of Babylon, the massacre of the Huguenots and the modern tragedy of industrial exploitation. And the combination justifies itself. As the four threads converge for the climax of the film, the action leaping with freedom and assurance from one century to another, the spectator even today still feels that the film medium is here finding wings of its own. Never have there been such awe-inspiring sets, such armies of extras, but these are less important than freedom of time and space, the real wealth of the
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