THE CINEMA
"This Was a Woman." (Empire.) — "The Emperor Waltz." (Carlton.)—" The Beast With Five Fingers." (Warner.)
Miss SONIA DRESDEL has a gift for being attractively vile, but all the same I doubt whether in real life her villainy could have been so long concealed from her family as it is in the film This Was a Woman. The love of immediate relatives is, after all, one of the least blind varieties, and I feel that Miss Dresdel's husband and children, while perhaps remaining obstinately affectionate for the sake of auld lang syne, would have had a pretty shrewd idea she was not as delightful as she seemed. But Mr. Walter Fitzgerald, whose only joy apart from Miss Dresdel lies in his dog and his prize roses, accepts the information that she has had the former put down and the latter cut up with nothing more than courteous resignation. He is a bit despondent, of course, for a while, and his daughter, Miss Barbara White, is also a little gloomy about the way her mother tries to wreck her marriage, but although every move that Mum makes is abnormal, corrupt and patently unpleasant, nobody is unduly fussed until she gets going with the arsenic. Personally I find it hard to believe that broody women with power complexes remain for long unchallenged by their dear ones, and although this film is extremely well acted it is also absolutely incredible, a fact which considerably detracts from its enjoyment.
Ring is with us again in a nice bit of Technicolor nonsense which is just a shade too whimsical for my taste. As a travelling salesman for the phonograph, Mr. Crosby comes, with a sample and a dog called Buttons, to Austria in the year 1901 ; and there he falls in love with Miss Joan Fontaine who has a poodle called Scherezade engaged, the poodle that is, to one of the Emperor's dogs. This dual romance, this love of man for woman and terrier for poodle, tacks pleasantly across the film's unruffled waters, sailing it must be con- fessed remarkably near the wind at times, and docking in the inevitable harbour at the end.
Mr. Crosby does not sing very much, but when he does he tosses off his songs in that easy devil-may-care fashion, that nonchalant unaffected way he has which makes him such an amiable fellow to have around. The Californian Tyrol echoes his notes, yodels at him and slaps its bare brown thighs in the approved manner, and all is sunshine and silliness. Mr. Richard Haydn gives an excellent interpretation of the Emperor Franz Josef, not too sentimental or over be-whiskered, but grave and simple and a little sad. The incredible foolishness of the story going on about him only serves to accentuate his dignity and considerably augment our pity. Miss Fontaine looks ravishing in a hectic Technicolored way ; Mr. Roland Culver as a dissolute baron is cheerfully nit-witted ; and although this is by no means one of Mr. Crosby's best pictures it is bound to give pleasure if only on account of the dogs, both of which arel ardent disciples of Sir James Barrie.
* * * *
It was evidently the intention of the producers of The Beast With Five Fingers so to congeal the blood of its spectators that only a brigade of St. John Ambulance men armed with hot-water bottles could liquefy it again ; but enough is surely enough, and a surfeit of horrors such as we have here leaves the hair flat on the head and the spine unoscillating. The chief character in this film is the com- poser, Mr. Victor Francen's, hand which, on his death, crawls about his Italian villa by its impalpable self to plague the inmates with malicious five-finger exercises. It is undoubtedly a beastly-looking thing, and it makes Mr. Peter Lorre and Miss Andrea King quite miserable, but I feel it would be more potently terrifying if there
Previous page
