CONTEMPORARY ARTS
THE THEATRE
Lady Audley's Secret. A Victorian Melodrama with Music, from the Popular Novel by Miss Braddon. (Princes.)
To do something badly on purpose it is first necessary to be able to do the same thing well. The clown who loses his balance, the ski- instructor who demonstrates what happens when you put your weight on the wrong leg, the parodist who can write trash which is both trashier than his victim's work and yet has a chance of surviving longer in men's memories—all these, I think, would sub- scribe to the truth of the preceding sentence. It is a failing in this production that the cast are competent rather than good actors, and when they are called upon—as they are throughout—to give a display of bad acting the result suffers from a certain lack of quality. They do it all quite adequately—the stereotyped gestures, the too audible asides, the posturings and grimaces ; and it is all quite funny. But only quite. They achieve a lampoon, but satire eludes them.
For all that there is plenty of entertainment in Lady Audley's Secret, and there will be more when the enterprising company from Camden Town have adapted themselvet to the vast antres of the Princes Theatre and imposed upon their electricians a better under- standing of their duties than they showed on the first night. The wicked governess who by captivating an elderly baronet makes her- self the mistress of Audley Court is really Lady Macbeth reduced, or perhaps inflated, to suit the perspective of the servants' hall ; and there is so much real drama in her progress from one villainy to the next that one rather wished that the producer had found it possible to let up, here and there, on the burlesque and play an occasional scene straight, for all it was worth.
Of the actors (whose capacity as singers was often over-taxed) Miss Pat Nye was a hissworthy villainess, Miss Anne Crawford a suitably innocent heroine and Mr. Richard Baldwyn a hero of great probity and resource. But it was Mr. Bill Shine, as the bigamous lady's first husband, who came the nearest to striking the note of true parody, and I thought it a great pity that the exigencies of the plot demanded that he should be pushed head first down a well in Act I by his unfeeling consort.
The audience, many of whom were clearly aficionados from Camden Town, co-operated loyally with the players, and the nightly manifestations of their disapprobation and esteem will doubtless contribute to the success of the production. PETER FLEMING.
THE CINEMA
Les Maudits." (Rialto.)--4, Les Amants de Verone." (Cameo- Polytechnie.)--.. Crime and Punishment." (Academy.) IT seems a pity that the French have become violent. One felt so certain, on setting out to see a French film, that one would be spared the kick in the stomach, the shot in the back, the arm twist. Granted Les Maudits concerns a German submarine with a passenger list consisting of a Gestapo agent, a German general, an Italian industrialist, a French collaborationist and a Norwegian scientist, plus two female forms divine to add piquancy to the voyage • but all the same, though this is combustible material, it was hardly to be expected that only one man should survive to tell the tale—a French doctor shanghaied from his peaceful seaside residence to serve his inglorious enemies.
The situation has many possibilities, but I fear that they have been exaggerated. This polyglot crowd of secret agents are being taken to South America to spread the gospel, but half way there it is dis- covered that Hitler is dead and Berlin fallen. Only the Gestapo officer, played with terrifying gusto by M. Jo Dest, wants to go on ; the rest wait for an opportunity to escape. One by one they eliminate themselves, are eliminated by the fanatical M. Dest or simply disappear. In the end half the crew mutinies and leaps off the submarine on to a freighter which is refuelling it, this being the signal for M. Dest to order it to be sunk by torpedoes and the survivors machine-gunned. It is hard to believe, however Teutonic a commander, that with the war over and for no very good reason he would murder his own men, and this final massacre of the innocents seems, if it wasn't so unpleasant, absurd. I cannot help feeling that it would have been infinitely more interesting to have stressed the psychological problems facing a crowd of traitors on V.E. day rather than to have subjected us to a blood bath. Still, the characters are well drawn, notably M. Paul Bernard as the collaborationist, and there is a magnificent bit of acting by Dalio, which is well worth a hearing.
* * * * Les Amants de Verone, the dialogue of which is written by M. Jacques Prevcrt, is a modem version of a Romeo and 7uliet set, appropriately enough, in Venice and Verona. It is as uneven a pro- duction as a level crossing on a branch railway line. The love story between two film extras, played by Anouk and M. Serge Reggiani, is simple and touching ; but the subsidiary story with its curves upward into melodrama and downward into lunacy is frankly incredible. The heroine is a member of an Italian family so decadent and depraved as to be thoroughly comic, and, though it undoubtedly throws into relief the innocence of young love, its mad, bad and sad antics totally upset the balance and destroy the mood. Just as one is getting accustomed to a drunk father, an hysterical mother and a mistress looking like Miss Hermione Gingold in one of her most outré sketches, there appears a cousin in riding boots and a pyjama jacket, carrying a plate of fish and a gun. It is hard to concentrate on the delicate love affair, the young stand-ins on the cardboard balcony, when the mind is still reeling from scenes of Tchckovian non sequitur. The acting is excellent throughout, Mlle. Marianne Oswald and M. Pierre Brasseur deserving special mention. * * * * The Swedish version of Crime and Punishment is a fine piece of work. It is always difficult to appreciate a film of which one does not understand a word, for captions are, through no fault of their own, the lowest form of literature. But Mr. Hampe Faustman's direction relies to a great extent on silence, and he builds upon this to create an atmosphere of appalling strain and tension. He plays the part of Raskolnikov himself, and is the very epitome of tortured misery. Sonia is played by Miss Gunn Wallgren, and she convinc- ingly conveys the innate goodness of Dostoevsky's fallen heroine. An impressive film comparing very favourably with other versions. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
Previous page
