CINEMA
Man on a Tightrope. (Odeon, Marble Arch.) Adorables Creatures.
(Curzon.)—Tonight We Sing. (Odeon, Leicester Square.)-- KAREL CERNIK, the Man on a Tightrope, is a Czech circus proprietor who refuses to combine propaganda with his clowning, falls foul of the secret police, and resolves to take his whole ramshackle troupe with him in a wild dash across the German frontier : it makes, a valid, if not entirely convincing, situation for a political melodrama, and one wishes that the film had been content to leave it at that. Elia Kazan, a director adept at giving a plausible, vivid look to events, gets it off, indeed, in top gear, when the police motor cyclists force the lumbering circus cavalcade off the road. But this is melodrama with serious pretensions ; Cernik's troubles with his wife and daughter, intrigues among the secret police, and some elementary political discussion, over which the script writer, Robert Sherwood, makes needlessly heavy weather, complicate the issue without really adding to its interest. And as the script picks its way through the Iron Curtain clichés, Mr. Kazan whips. up the excitement by increasingly artificial means.
As Cernik, Fredric March has the worst of Mr. Sherwood's dialogue : " I want to entertain the people, the, poor, unhappy people," he declaims, raising that hanchome, ravaged face which— through no fault of his own—still seems to belong to the New England salesman. His performance is highly proficient as, in an undeveloped part as the bored wife, is that of Gloria Grahame. But Mr. Kazan, never ready to let well alone, packs the film with so many clever bits of business, so much conscientiously lively circus detail, that even the last helter-skelter dash across the bridge under the guns of the guards seems mainly a laborious display of technique. The performances of Dorothea Wieck, a defiantly battered old trouper, and Richard Boone, the circus's only Communist, bring this rather irritatingly pretentious piece closest to reality.
Good films customarily bring in their wake a trail of second-rate imitations and, in spite of a programme note in which the director, Christian-Jaque, apostrophises woman —" a cocktail in whose composition enter in equal doses reticences, cruelty, sweetness and perfidy " and so on, at length—one may perhaps not unfairly suspect that the inspiration ofAdorables Creatures came less from the adorable- ness, or otherwise, of women than from the success of La Ronde. But this story of a young man whose wedding-day flashbacks take in three affairs—with Christine, who has no serious intention of leaving her husband, with Minouche, who prefers a diamond-laden millionaire, and with Denise, a wealthy but ageing widow—has perhaps a tenth of the wit, and rather less than that of the taste, of La Ronde itself. It is, in fact, a little depressing to see the French subscribing so coyly, not to say heavily, to all the tourist notions of Gallic naughtiness. A slick presentation has, inevitably, itS bright moments ; some acid dialogue, reminiscent of The Women, though less witty ; Danielle Darrieux's sophisticated and amusing performance in the first episode ; the biting little sketch of a jealous secretary from Renee Faure. Mlle Faure wins the last round on points from Edwige Feuillere, who for once seems to misjudge her effects. Daniel Gain, flung from one woman to another and con- triving adroitly to land on his feet, spends his time between affairs as artist for a fashion magazine. And this is the world, glossy, cold, and all too deliberately smart, to which the film insistently belongs.
Tonight We Sing is one of those adulatory biographies of living men for which Hollywood has found an inflexible formula. Sol Hurok, we are told, made himself a theatre impresario by bluffing his way into the dressing-rooms of the great ; he forgot his wedding anniver- sary, and his wife left him ; bankruptcy threatened him, and back she came. Little more is required of David Wayne, as Mr. Hurok, than a somewhat shaky Russian accent and the rapt, greedy stare of
a collector about to sign up a new star. PENELOPE. HOUSTON.
(Miss Virginia Graham, who has been on holiday, will be back next week.)
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