The Cinema
" Evergreen." At the New Gallery IN films directed by Victor Saville there is seldom any obvious display of camera tricks, but one can always feel in them the vitality that comes from translating the interplay of character and feeling into visual terms. Evergreen, freely adapted from Mr. Cochran's production of Benn Levy's play, will hardly rank as one of his best pictures. The story is too ragged, its sentiment too artificial. But the best episodes have so much verve that they are very pleasant to watch, even though their connexion with one another never seems very important.
Miss Jessie Mathews appears first as Harriet Green, an Edwardian music-hall favourite who suddenly leaves the stage at the height of her success, and later as Harriet's daughter. The reser.lblance between the two is so close that a revue producer is persuaded to present the young Harriet as her mother, the " eternal star," supposed to have returned from exile as full as ever of charm and beauty. The public are duly deceived, but various people who knew the original Harriet are still alive, including her drunken husband and the now aged Marquis of Staines, who had hoped to marry her himself. The resulting complications are fairly entertaining, but it is never quite certain whether the film is meant to be a musical comedy or a sentimental fairy-tale.
Mr. Sonnie Hale works very hard as the revue producer, and to him the film owes nearly all its most amusing moments. Miss Jessie Mathews is light and graceful, and her technique is far more assured and accomplished than when she first appeared on the screen, but it is hard for anyone so modern in type to suggest an Edwardian beauty. Miss Betty Balfour, most popular of all British stars in silent diys, reappears as a chorus girl who marries into the aristocracy, and it is pleasant to see her carry off this minor part with a good deal of her old racy skill.
Evergreen inaugurates a new policy at the New Gallery, where in future the main film will always be a British produc- tion. I have seen many better British pictures, but some of the sequences, which include elaborate musical numbers, are good examples of British studio craftsmanship.
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