CINEMA
"The Browning Version." (Odeon.)--“ Les Casse-Pieds." (Cameo-Polytechnic.) MR. TERENCE RatrmAN's portrait of a schoolmaster who has failed both in his private and In his public life was unveiled on the stage for us by Mr. Eric Portman in a vivid and memorable manner. It would be hard to better his performance, yet in the film adaptation of The Browning Version Mr. Michael Redgrave, while conforming a little more rigidly to the traditional outline of the unpopular dominiel succeeds, at any rate, in being equally moving. At moments I found him profoundly so.
Here is a man who started his career with great hopes atm high ideals, but who, through marrying a woman as incapable of supply- ing his intellectual needs as he is of satisfying her physical ones, has, under constant humiliation, retreated behind a wall of loveless, inhuman indifference. The brief breaching of this waft by a schoolboy, played most delicately by Brian Smith, is beautifully handled by both author and actors. Indeed, the whole picture, so restrained and unsentimental, brushed at times with a gentle wit, and with its griefs deceptively cloaked in brave words, is a perfect example of a modern English tragedy—agony bottled up in good manners and slipped without splash into well-behaved waters.
Miss Jean Kent as the frustrated wife, Mr. Nigel Patrick as the master with whom she has an affair and Mr. Wilfrid Hyde White as the school's Head give smooth rounded performances, and the film is directed unerringly by that fine, subtle artist Mr. Anthony Asquith.
M. Noel-Notil has evolved a masterpiece of madness which is, unfortunately, marred, one might almost say destroyed, by an English commentary. One can appreciate the difficulty of present- ing this fantasy to an English audience, for it takes the form of a lecture, somewhat similar to the late Mr. Benchley's, on bores, the illustrations being offered in the medium of stage, film and puppetry. Obviously a lecture cannot be sub-titled, as the reading matter would stretch the length and breadth of the screen, but in this instance it would have been better, and not, I think, over-optimistic, to suppose that the English who go to see French films can under- stand French. Although the series of sketches retain a full measure of enchantment and the bores arc anything but boring, the material which links them together, the arch roguishness of the English script emerging from M. Noel-Nod, is acutely irritating. Never- theless this is so new, so gay, and at times so funny a film that
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