The Cinema
"Reifende Jugend." At the Forum.—" The Bride Comes Home." At the Plaza. —"King of the Damned." - At the Tivoli
THERE is a delightful moment in Reifende Jugend, a film which is described as " a psychological study of three girls who enter a boys' school to prepare for their final examina- tion," when the headmaster tells the science master, who confesses to him that he has fallen in love with one of the girls : " Be patient. Remember that after the examination she is no longer a pupil." In another scene one of the senior class discloses a plot to steal the examination papers. " Tonight the head's room will be searched." " Suppose,"
says the other boy, " he finds nothing ? " " Then he will study the blotters with a mirror." These two pieces of dialogue give a rough idea of the spirit of this entertaining film : the charmingly realistic attitude of the headmaster towards the sexual problem, the serious, absurd, emotional, Teutonically thorough schoolboys. It is an odd film because the situations seem fantastic to English eyes, and the bare summary which the management of the Forum supplies does justice only to this oddity :
" One of the girls is loved by both the Science Master and a pupil. Intense rivalry exists between them, and the boy threatens to expose the master unless he help him through his exam. The master ignores this threat, consequently the boy fails. The Headmaster, sus- pecting something, questions the boy, who refuses to implicate the master. The Headmaster, touched by his strength of character, persuades the board of examiners to pass him, asserting that strength of character and personal worth are more effective than examination papers."
It certainly doesn't do justice to the -light lyrical treatment of • some of the scenes, the truthful, unsentimental but not unkindly picture of emotional awkwardness.
Compare this film with that embarrassing play, Young Woodley. Mr. Van Druten put an exaggerated value on adolescent emotion ; it was a play about adolescence written
by an adolescent, and he tried to make the boy's passion dignified and tragic. But the truth is seldom tragic, for
human beings are not made in that grand way... The truth may be sad, but it is .nearly always grotesque as well, and the value of this film is that it catches the absurdity jot as effectively as it catches the freshness. Herr-Heinrich George gives a charming performance as the realistic, coarse, kindly headmaster and the . acting of Fraulein Hertha The:le, as unemphatic as her pale ashen hair, needs no recommendation to those who remember her in Mddchen in Uniform. , Miss Claudette Colbert has been three times lucky— in It Happened One Night, her best film, which has been revived. this week at the Royal Court Cinema,. in She Married Her Boss, and now in The Bride, Comes Home, a
comedy of fiery-tempered and:incompatible, lovers who fight their way into .marriage. For it :is exceptionally lucky in the cinema to be given a - chance to develop your proper talent, and the fact that Miss Colbert is the most charming light-comedy actress on the screen did not prevent Holly- , wood from starring her as Cleopatra, so that she might have complained with Nell Gwyn :
" . . I walk because I die
Out of my Calling, in a Tragedy.
0 Poet, damn'd duff Poet, who could. prove,
So senseless ! to make Nelly die for lova." • .
None of the earlier films has a more memorable sequence than that of the nocturnal marriage by a small-toVvn the AmeriCan equivalent_ of the Gretna -Green blacksmith. The whole scene, the; little hideous -parlanr, the cracked harmonium,. the flowery mechanical service composed by , the judge himself, is -satirical Comedy Of a very.higkorder. Mr. Walter Forde, who was responsible for one of the worst- of last year's films, The Tunnel, has directed king of the Damned, with Mi. Conrad Veidt, Mr.:Noah Beery _and Miss Helen _Vinson in the chief parts.' One notices the same lavish expenditure, the same inability to cast the small parts realistically (one doesn't expect a convict in a tropical penal . settlement to speak with an' accent), but the dialogue is a little, better.' The stOry of a wicked corn-- mandatit 'arid -a mutiny led by a convict with itiCai of social reform is unconvincing.
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