CINEMA
The End of the Affair. (Empire.)—The Long Gray Line. (Leicester Square.) Ir is very difficult to he objective about a film in which religious views contrary to one's own play an important part. Graham Greene's The End of the Affair is, in the simplest terms, a battle between sex and religion, but it is a battle
in which a personal god chooses to trick an agnostic into believing, who leads his sinner through superstition to repentance, who tortures and kills to save. If you do not happen to believe that God is like that, the film, admir- able as it is in many ways, takes on an unreal quality, its appeal dulled by a feeling of slight irritation or perhaps, to be more modest, of obtuseness. There are three main characters, a civil servant, his wife and her lover. During blitz on London the lover is crushed by a fall- ing door and to all appearances is dead. His mistress, in anguish, prays to the God in whom she does not believe, swearing that if her lover can only live she will renounce their adulterous liaison. Her prayers are answered and she keeps her vow.
It was a pity to choose Van Johnson as the lover for such a subtly drawn triangle. It is necessary ;to have an American star in an Anglo-American production, but Mr. Johnson is palpably extrovert, and though he gives a good performance, hatred, suffering and jealousy sit uneasily on his bland features. That the bland suffer cannot he denied, but in this particular intellectual muddle a more in- trospective approach is required. As the wife, Deborah Kerr has never been better. She is
very restrained, very quiet, her mental agonies. her frantic search for comfort from priest and atheist in turn engraving their tragic marks but slowly on her personality. As a portrait of civilised despair this is a masterpiece. Peter Cushing. too, though his part has been reduced to a shadow, gives, as the bewildered husband, a sensitive performance, and as the private de- tective hired by Mr. Johnson to spy on his be- loved, John Mills contributes a charming comi-pathetic study, out of context, belonging to some other film, but nice.
Edward Dmytryk has tackled a hard task with courage and, at moments, with inspira- tion, but the agonies of the soul arc not photo- genic and even he, master that he is, cannot make the contemplation of abstracts anything but a sedentary occupation. Mr. Greene sees to it that we are always interested, batting with equal aplomb for both sides and bowling at our middle stumps with thought-provoking problems, but the film remains a cerebral exer- cise rather than the fierce emotional death struggle between good and evil which was in- tended.
The Long Gray Line is the longest and grayest film I have seen in years. It is the true life story of an Irish emigrant, Marty Mahler, who joined the US military academy at West Point as a mess waiter and then became a PT instructor, an appointment which he held for fifty years. Mr. Mahler is evidently a great character and to West Pointers an institution, but although Tyrone Power, with a fine brogue and a jaunty eye, does his best to convince us of his hero's importance, the slowness and length and lack of events in his life leave us doubting. Maureen O'Hara, Ward Bond, Donald Crisp and hundreds of poker-backed youths plod, under Henry Ford's laborious direction, down a road full of sentimental pit- falls into which they joyfully tumble, blow- ing bugles and waving the Stars and Stripes as they fall. Incidentally, how is it, I wonder. that such rigidly disciplined, ramrod-stiff officers turn into those lovable but somewhat flexible figures we know so well?
VIRGINIA GRAHAM
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