THE CINEMA
" Mr. Skeffington." At Warners. —" Nob Hill." At the Gaumont.
Miss BETFE DAVIS can claim credit for a long, lone war against the more obvious sentimentalities of the cinema. She has acknowledged the existence of modes of behaviour neither angelic nor villainous and has revealed that not all the secret places of the heart are pretty Technicolored grottes. In Mr. Skeffington we see her as a beauty of 1914 contracting a marriage of expediency with a rich Jewish broker (played by Claude Rains), whom subsequently she treats most cruelly in her pursuit of a continuing supply of male admiration. Her portrait of an ageing woman clinging still to the conceits of youth is stark and convincing. No doubt there is something syn- thetic about Miss Davis's performances. But if we are conscious less of spontaneity than of a careful calculation of voice and glance and gesture, then her painstaking seems to spring from a sincere desire to contribute to the cinema that dramatic quality which it most conspicuously lacks—naturalistic characterisation.
Yet it must be faced that only in isolated episodes and fleeting moments is there much temptation to mistake the happenings of Mr. Skeffington for the facts of life. In order to satisfy some, at any rate, of the time-honoured criteria of box-office success, the film has been cast in the form of a life of complete selfishness rounded off with a sequence of complete last-minute reformation. So that in the blackness and whiteness there can be no more than moments of insight which fail to combine into a consistent and developing characterisation. That we should find sufficient reward in this is an indication of how rarely in the normal film even a single line of dialogue or a gesture is completely true to life.
Nob Hill is another turn-of-the-century musical film of life on the Barbary Coast. George Raft is the saloon-keeper, Vivian Blaine his faithful cabaret singer, and Joan Bennett is in the role of the fickle society girl who threatens their romance. The violent colours of this film serve as a reminder that screen colour may undergo considerable changes in the post-war world. We have come to accept hard, bright hues as standard for the screen, but Nazi films like The Adventures of Baron Munchausen which have been photo- Vaphed and reproduced by a German colour method suggest that new possibilities lie ahead. The German colours are soft and warm —indeed, sometimes the pastel shades are over-subtle and delicate to the part of wateriness. Presumably Board of Trade investiga- tions into the availability of such enemy inventions will take into account the present restrictions imposed on colour films by the virtual monopoly of one colour system. The British industry in particular would be assisted by the opportunity to employ an alternative. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a somewhat surprising film to have been produced in Nazi Germany in 1942-43. It is pure fantasy, witty and sophisticated (although the wit some- times suffers from coarse Teutonic additions). There appears to be no sign of propaganda. The amorous and imaginative Baron (played by that old German film-star Hans Albers) visits many foreign lands, including Turkey, Russia and Italy, but neither picture nor dialogue attempts to point any modern moral in relation to these countries. The film is most remarkable for a spectacular festival sequence shot in Venice (with little or no assistance from studio sets) and for a delightfully imaginative sequence taking place on the moon. The question of whether this German film should be made generally available is no doubt a matter of some complexity.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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