12 JULY 1946, Page 12

THE CINEMA

"I See a Dark Stranger." At the Odeon, Leicester Square.—"A Night in Casablanca." At the Gaumont Haymarket, and the Marble Arch Pavilion.

AT times I See a Dark Stranger appears to be the result of a very successful world-convention of ace screenwriters, so packed is it with ingenious incidents, elaborate story twists, locations shifting from the picturesque to the sordid, and a flow of pointed and economic dialogue. This aspect of the film may account for its being a trifle over-long, but it certainly does not account for the homogeneity which it achieves and which raises it far above the level of the ordinary comedy-thriller. As in Millions Like Us and Waterloo Road, Messrs. - Launder and Gilliatt have used their long experience in writing for the film in a purposeful and entirely satis- factory way. They are in fact pursuing a thesis which Hollywood simultaneously seems to be abandoning—the thesis that the ordinary cinema-goer is an intelligent sort of chap.

I See a Dark Stranger is in many ways reminiscent of The Lady Vanishes and other Hitchcock thrillers of the 'thirties. It has many of the same tricks of story and of suspense. But for my money it is a vastly superior-article, if only because it chooses a theme which allows for skating on ideological ice as well as providing all the fun of the chase. It is, in brief, the tale of an Irish girl who has been brought up on memories of the Troubles, and has thereby acquired a consuming but entirely sentimental hatred of England (Scottish readers please note) ; she therefore engages herself in the service of German agents who are seeking the exact location of our D-Day invasion. After a series of hair-raising adventures, and, of course, after falling in love with an English officer, she destroyS the wanted document as soon as she discovers it, and goes willingly into intern- ment until the end of the war.

Launder and Gilliatt have embellished this story with immense skill. Much of the action takes place in Eire, Somerset and the Isle of Man, and, in addition, the sets, notably that of a squalid Liverpool hotel, have an immense authenticity. They use soliloquy—that trickiest of screen tricks—very successfully (note especially the suspense sequence in the railway carriage), and, with the aid of William Alwyn's score, have used music as a valuable adjunct to the drama, and not as a mere bumbling in the background.

The casting is admirable. Raymond Huntley is enormously con- vincing as a German agent ; Garry Marsh and Tom Macaulay give wicked caricatures of Army types ; and Trevor Howard is a con- vincing and human hero. But it is Deborah Kerr who runs away with the film. She is seldom off the screen, and even less seldom off the Irish brogue, with which she alternately blandishes and insults practically everyone.

In the rarity of their screen appearance the Marx Brothers are almost beginning to emulate Garbo and Chaplin, and as a result their audiences are likely to approach any new offering in a critical, if not an apprehensive, mood. Let it be said immediately that A Night in Casablanca is by no means vintage Marx ; but let it be said, too, that it disarms criticism because, once again, they all three do all the things we expect of them. Handicapped as they are by a story which involves the dumbest of heroes and heroines in French war-politics, they nevertheless succeed in plastering the screen and ourselves with their own especial anarchies. Harpo, I suspect, has a new and rather more respectable wig, but his sign language (accompanied by those nightmare whistles) is unimpaired, and his harp-playing as enjoyable as ever. Chico's fingers still do the un- expected on the piano-keys, although in other respects he seems a little more subdued than Usual. But Groucho, as ever, steals the film, at one moment with his appallingly outrageous wisecracks and at another with his crouching and ineluctable determination as " with Tarquin's ravishing strides" he pursues the beautiful spy from bed- room to bedroom. For him alone the film is well worth seeing.

BASIL WRIGHT.