The Cinema
" rvE been timid, O'Man. I've been holding myself in. I haven't done myself justice. I've kept down the sim- mering, seething, teeming ideas. . . ." The voice of Mr. Polly's friend Parsons came irresistibly to my mind as the vast expensive Korda-Wells film of the future ground noisily on its way, as I watched the giant aeroplanes, the stream- lined tanks, the bright complex meaningless machinery of Mr. Wells's riotous fancy. The reformed clothes, the odd rather Grecian dresses with square shoulders and pouter pigeon breasts, this whole vision of a world peopled by beautiful idealistic scientists would certainly have appealed to the rapturous literary provincial Parsons, the inventor of the Port Burdo3k school of window-dressing. Parsons too was an idealist.
Nevertheless a third of this film is magnificent. No one but the author of War in the Air could have created so vividly, with such horribly convincing detail, the surprise air raid with which the great war of 1944) opens : the lorry with loud speakers in Piccadilly Circus urging the crowd to go quietly home and close all windows and block all aper: vs against gas, the emergency distribution of a few inadequate masks, the cohort of black planes driving over the white southern cliffs, the crowd milling in subways, the dreadful death cries from the London 'bus, the faceless man in evening dress dead in the taxi. But from this point the film steadily deteriorates, though the world's reversion to barbarism, the plague, the small parochial dictator who carries on twenty years later the same war with the same slogans against his parish neighbour, like a mediaeval Della Scala, has the acuteness and authenticity of a lesson properly drawn from history. It is with the intrusion of Mr. Wells's " Great Conspiracy," an organisation of airmen working together from a base in Basra to clean up the world, that the film begins to lose all its interest in the clouds of Mr. Wells's uncontrolled fancies, vague, optimistic, child-like. " I am Wings over the World," the strange airman persistently and irritatingly replies to the robber leader's question, " Who are you " As Mr. Polly remarked when he saw Parsons' window-dressing, " The High Egrugious is fairly On."
The unreligious mind when it sets about designing a heaven for itself is apt to be trivial, portentous, sentimental. Out of the simmering, seething, teeming ideas of Mr. Wells there emerges, after the reformed dresses, the underground city, the new machinery, the classless society, the television, the tiny wireless sets worn on the wrist, the endless little mechanical toys, the realisation that something after all is still missing. It never ceases to come as a shock to a mind like Mr. Wells's that a man can still be unhappy when he has leisure, food, comfort and the best modern dynamos. But it comes as even more of a shock to his audience that Mr. Wells can think of no less old-fashioned a way of appeasing this sense of dissatisfaction than by shooting two of his characters at the moon, (" The best of life "—nobody in this film speaks less bookishly than that—" lies nearest to the edge of death,") and the film closes with a sky of stars and some hollow optimistic phrase about the infinite spaces and the endlessness of man's future progress. It is in such smug and sentimental terms that the characters in this film always speak. Only Mr. Polly, I think, could find the right words to describe their embarrassing eloquence. " Sesquippledan," one can almost hear him saying, " sesquippledan verboojuice. Eloquent Rapsodooce."
When the noise and the shouting has subsided it may be possible to suggest that M. Sachs Guitry's Bonne Chance is worth a dozen Things to Come, whether you consider it as cinema, as entertainment or even as social criticism. It is a charming silly film in the Clair genre, a lyrical absurdity. It reminds one again that only the cinema and music among the arts have been able to convey this sense of poignant happiness, the quickness and lightness and transience of a sensation you cannot call by any name so heavy as joy : " the phoenix hour " : the nearest to a Utopia poor mankind
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