Cinema
TIGER IN THE SKY. (Warner.)---LA P . . RESPECTUEUSE. (Continentale.)
COMMERCIALLY it has been proved that cinema audiences, like children, love being told the same story again and again. Invisibly clad in warm flannel nighties they snuggle into their stalls, and with eyes starry and mouths open they listen to Mummy Movie's dear familiar tale. If she strays one word from its accus- tomed form they burst into tears. They should be happy with Henry Blanke's Tiger in the Sky, for it comes from a long and hackneyed line of Air Force pictures, its hero, played with unusual vivacity by Alan Ladd, being a man who has flying in his blood, wife and children coming a bad second to the aeroplane, One knows from the outset that June Allyson is in for a rough time, that after her husband's sale return from the Second World War there will be the Korean War, and after that he will have a desk job which will make him dreadfully crotchety, and after that she will agree to him testing out neW jet models. One is pretty ce • taro, too, that he will get killed and that sorry one will convince his widow that he did not die in vain.
Knowing the plot so well one can look around, relaxed-wise as Gene Kelly would says to see if there are any features in this film which do not remind one of its elder brothers. Right at the beginning, before it settles down into the cliche, the dialogue has a modest quota of originality, Frank Faylen as a sergeant and Miss Allyson singing a neat duet in sharps' Embarrassing slush in a minor key soon spoils this. The shots of Mr. Ladd,chasing MiGs are effective and the one of his plane breaking the sound barrier beautiful. His death, too, thou8k expected, and even, by this time, desirable, is dramatic enough to excite and horrify. But between these quickening moments the reels grind very slowly; the story of kissings, part' ings, reunions, motherhood and patriotism gaining nothing in its retelling but some extra glue.
There is nothing sticky about Jean Paul Sartre's La P . . . Respectueuse, although it too, is on a familiar theme, that of racial prejla' dice. It is an extremely good film, a brilliant, bitter, and of course thoroughly depressit8 record of injustice as practised in the Southern States of America. A prostitute, played with beguiling brassiness by Barbara Laage, nesses the murder of a negro by the drank nephew of an influential Senator. By every means in their power, police, politicians and relatives try to get her to sign a statement swearing that the negro was attacking her and the white man defending her, the most potent argument put forward being that if one of two nien has to die it is surely better that the one with a good education, a good military record, a good background and good prospects should be saved. Miss Laage gives a fine performance as the girl who can no longer be much stir' prised by perfidy and corruption, whose intelli- gence is not high, whose heart is a cynic, but who, save for one tragic moment of weakness, retains, against the fanatical wishes of an e • tire community, a sense of right. Ivan DesnY, Walter Bryant and Marcel Herrand also give excellent performances. The directors, Marcel Pagliero and Charles Brabant, have built this film with the bricks of fear and the mortar of hatred to make an edifice which both attacks and repels. Admirably photographed, at d scored by Georges Auric, this picture, for all its moral ending and for all its msthetic at d technical brilliance, leaves one in bleak despair. Which is what it should do, of course.
M VIRGINIA GRAHA
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