LE tgFRoQiit. (Curzon.) I FIRST saw Le Defroque (called Lo
Spretalo and dubbed in Italian) in Italy last Novembe r in a freezing cold shack of a cinema with wooden scats and an audience that saw (muic or less) what the film was driving at. It can now be seen in armchaired comfort and i original language with an audience half a which appears to be shocked out of anY attempt at understanding. True, the film IS about as ruthless, in parts as horrifying, as de brilliantly ferocious direction of Leo Joanne° and the uncompromising acting of a man like Pierre Fresnay can make it; the end moun s to a frenzied climax I could hardly bear to s t tight and watch, owing mainly to a squeamish private distaste for the sight of blood pourirg out of people's ears. Yet it is hard to see wIlY religion, which, treated whimsically, can 8' t away with cinematic antics in the most dubiot taste, when treated as a subject for trageeY and—what is more to the point—as a mon.. theme in daily life, should arouse extremes ( f resentment and disgust. To a predominantl Y Catholic audience this story of a priest turned violently against his past beliefs and leading a life of what you might call austere and ded • cated sin in the best satanic traditions must perhaps mean more than it would to other if only because the shocks and horrors arc nit testhetic, but actual; not questions of taste, but of sacrilege. When the priest, as a vicious jok consecrated a large quantity of wine in one ( f those film nightclubs full of wild gipsy flddfrs and leering faces, and the young seminarist knelt and drank it amid roars of laughter, and then reeled into the street to give thanks for his communion, the Italian audience held i 5 breath : not, of course, that it was composed entirely of pious Catholics, but that it could judge the enormity of what was happening, that the background of belief in the actuali Y —and therefore the horror—of what was beit shown made the shock great enough, CI ° seriousness deep enough, to shake people inl° some sort of adequate response. People I° whom, even retrospectively, (a) transubstan' tiation and (h) the continuity of the priesthood even in apostasy mean little, will probably fir d the incident merely squalid, and testhetical Y quite indefensible. And so it goes on with much of the film.
The priest's life is shown in it as an inten e moral struggle involving, not the world and d e flesh—to both of which he appears almost i humanly indifferent — but that ancie t morality-play character, the devil. If ever a man possessed was shown on the screen, it is Pierre Fresnay as the priest : he reaches heroic heights of terror and insanity.. The mi d counterpart of his magnificent Monsietr Vincent, wilder, more obsessed than his fake' priest in Dieu a besoin des hommes, this anti' clerical cleric, this hounded, Gnd-riddi n creature is surely the most haunting of t is priests we have yet met or can hope to meet. The smaller parts, too, are beautifully played: Marcelle Stephane as the mother, Pierre Trabaud as the devoted young friend, Nicole Courcel as the horrible predatory girl.
Revivals : Chaplin's sound version of Tile Gold Rush, at the London Pavilion; and, dur-
ing August and September, an agreeable collec-
tion, at the Everyman, Hampstead, of fairlY recent films, including Hitchcock's Rear Will' dow. Reed's The Fallen Idol and The Third Man, Huston's The African Queen, and Renoir's The River.
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