THE CINEMA
Hortobagy was shown privately some years ago to the Film Society and George Hoellering, who made it, has tried many times since to persuade the British Board of Film Censors that his film is suit- able for public showing. Now the L.C.C. has granted a licence for it to be exhibited to "adult audiences" within its area of juris- diction and the London public may see what it is that has aroused the alarm of the Censors. Hortobagy is the story of the peasants Of the great Hungarian plain which gives the film its name, and it reflects the intimate concern of peasants everywhere with the cycle of semination, birth and death. I imagine the British Board of Film Censors was worried mainly by one sequence. It is of the foaling of two mares. The camera reports this event with the same seriousness mixed with pleasure which is recorded also in the watch- ing faces of the Czikos, and it is hard to see what harm could Possibly come to the general British public were it confronted with such a biological fact in all its natural dignity.
The strength of this rerdarkable film lies in its feeling for every aspect of the richness of a fecund countryside. From time to time the screen fills with beautiful Hungarian horses galloping in great droves across the plain, or the camera wanders amongst the herds of cattle outlining against the rich skies their wide and delicate horns. Then there is market day, with dancing, drinking and singing, and the peasants preoccupied with their own problems of mating, breed- ing and death. There is a thin thread of a story running through the film and the symbolic antagonism between the horses of the plain and the encroaching machines of industrial civilisation belongs to the screen ideologies of the era of montage in which the film was made. It is not the story, however, nor the acting—wooden to the point of stylisation—which counts, so much as the atmosphere of a people and of a place and the deep and comforting impression of natural forces at work.
The civilisation of a great modem city is, perhaps, too complex to submit to the methods of Hortobagy. In any case the motives of a Hollywood production like Under the Clock are different from Mr. Hoellering's. Yet the latter film makes a commendable attempt to give us a cross-section of New York life by following a soldier and his girl from Grand Central Station, to the Zoo, to Fifth Avenue, a museum, a milk depot, hotels, restaurants, bars, offices and so on, making at each port of call some amusing or revealing contact with the local citizenry. Miss Judy Garland and Mr.. Robert Walker comply with the normal conventions of screen entertainment by dropping in also at a registry office, and their romance is warm and endearing, but neither their screen behaviour nor that of the majority of the New York citizens they encounter can be regarded as pro- viding reliable raw material for the anthropologist.
Report on Italy is a March of Time item which closely ap- proaches the original authoritative standards of that screen magazine. The parlous present condition of the Italian people is put in his- torical perspective and the world sensibly reminded of the sacrifices and suffering of anti-Fascist Italians as well as of the need for Italy's expiation of her crimes. The voice of the widow of a slain anti- Fascist movingly speaks the commentary to the grim events which culminated in the trial and execution of Pietro Caruso and the death by popular violence of Donato Carretta.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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