THE CINEMA
Retrospect
"WHERE be your gibes now ? your gambols ? your songs ? your flashes of merriment ? " Chap-fallen indeed must the
Cinema appear each New Year's Eve before such an inter- rogation. Each year, if we are lucky, we can add maybe one or two works of genius to our muddled Louvre, but often as not it is difficult to trace even one. How many masterpieces have we seen in 1938? That noble and moving documenta- tion, The Spanish Earth, for all its faults comes nearest perhaps to the full qualifications ; but even so one hesitates to award the prize. We must, in fact, descend to lower reaches ; let it be understood that a roster of worthy films of the year must be based on a rating somewhere between beta plus and alpha minus. That this means that the films in question stand notably above the general and multitudinous outpourings of the studios should by the same token be self-evident.
Memorable on these terms were firstly a number of comedies. Nothing Sacred, with Ben Hecht's viperish scenario and dialogue, and its clever use of colour ; A Slight Case of Murder, a superb parody of Gangsterdom by Damon Runyon, per- formed by one of the finest all-round casts ever collected by Hollywood ; Professor Beware ! in which Harold Lloyd produced a grand Keystone Cavalcade in the most up-to-date manner possible ; Swiss Miss and Blockheads, the last lunatic swan-songs (we must allow them one each) of Laurel and Hardy ; all these remain vivid in the memory. Of melo- dramas the most striking was surely Marie Walewska, which, though admirably made qua film, depended nevertheless almost entirely on great acting by Garbo and Boyer ; it is their vision which persists. Dead End, though sociologically muddle-headed, had a stamp of sincerity ; it is a pity that the screen is now flooded with cheap imitations which exploit ad nauseam those brilliant guttersnipes of the New York slums. Also in the category of melodrama, though for less serious reasons, come Spawn of the North, which took us to frozen Alaska with all the gusto we thought had died with Griffith ; Carnet de Bal, because in it Duvivier presented, with certain flashes of real genius, a series of episodes specially designed for the talents of France's finest actors and actresses ; and Yellow jack, which attempted, not without success, to record the heroism of the men whose research freed the world from the menace of the stegomyia mosquito.
Of our own industry we may speak more happily than usual. Anthony Asquith's Pygmalion was a notable achieve- ment, not least for the assured manner in which he turned stagey material into true film form ; Hitchcock, in The Lady Vanishes, produced the wittiest and most efficient comedy- thriller of his career ; and among other good British films were A Yank at Oxford, Herbert Brenon's The Housemaster, and that curious hybrid (Pornmer-Laughton) St. Martin's Lane. The Citadel must await 1939 discussion.
Our own special contribution to Cinema, the Documentary Film, continues to forge ahead. North Sea, by Cavalcanti and Watt, added to adventurous realism a dramatic quality which gained rather than lost by being strictly controlled by fact. Seven films produced for the Films of Scotland Com- mittee celebrated the first successful attempt by any country to present a planned picture of its life, work, and problems ;
Alex Shaw's Five Faces and John Taylor's Dawn of Iran carried the reportage to imaginative and sensitive conclusions ; and both Gaumont British Instructional and Strand Iihn ; presented their admirable biological series under the gcner 11
titles of Secrets of Life and Animal Kingdom respectively. Finally, America sent over a direct and welcome challenge to
our documentarians in the form of The River, a dramatic study of one of the States' major problems by Pare Lorentz.
Of the prospects for 1939 there is little to be said. No doubt -one craze will be exchanged for another ; super-films will come and go ; and we can at least hope that there will be a film or two to remind us that the prolonged adolescence of Cinema is not going to last for ever : "Now conscience chills her, and now passion burns, And atheism and religion take their turns; A very heathen in the carnal part, Yet still a sad, good Christian at her heart."
BASIL WRIGHT.
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