CINEMA
"Crisis." (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion.)—" She Shall Have Murder." (Metropole, Victoria, on Sunday.)—" To Please a Lady." (Empire.) Crisis will inevitably be compared to State Secret seeing that they share the same story. In both a holiday-making surgeon is tricked into performing a serious operation on a reigning dictator. State Secret, however, was in the nature of a thriller, and its primary object was to keep us in a suspended condition eased, on occasions, by laughter. Crisis, on the other hand, faces the doctor's dilemma much more seriously, and far from supplying us with thrills and laughs, settles down to grave dialectics on the ethics of the case. As the surgeon, the sole representative of democracy in a stewpot of tyrants and revolutionaries, Mr. Cary Grant gives a fine solemn performance ; and Mr. Jose Ferrer, remarkably argumentative and perky for a man with a brain tumour, makes an excellent if some- what theatrical dictator. The film's virtue lies, however, in its crowd scenes, in its riots and assassinations and lootings. These are directed by Mr. Richard Brooks with much brilliance. Taken from a novel by Mr. Delano Ames, She Shall Have Murder is a pleasant easy-going thriller, not over-burdened with plausibility in the story line but nicely seasoned with reasonable and amusing dialogue in the best Ames tradition. Miss Rosamund John and Mr. Derrick de Marney are the two amateur detectives who, in attempting to write a novel centred on Miss John's office-life, find that their fictions are indeed facts, and lethal ones at that. In the pursuit of clues—and, of course, everybody in the film is suspect of the murder of Miss Mary Jerrold—they remain, I am glad to say, obstinately amateurish. Mr. Felix Aylmer as the lawyer, Miss Joyce Heron as a clerk and Mr. Harry Fowler as an odious office-boy give sturdy supporting performances and prevent one from looking too closely at the plot's manifold weaknesses.
As for the film at the Empire, it defies description save from the pen of a motor mechanic, since it is ear-splittingly concentrated on car-racing. At intervals of roughly five minutes we are asked to watch Mr. Clark Gable, concealed in crash-helmet and mud, tearing round and round in a supercharged racer, and although we can just see that he is being tough and determined this hardly comes under the heading of acting. In the few quiet moments vouchsafed us he and Miss Barbara Stanwyck, also a tough baby but in the newspaper racket, get together to argue about their personal
ambitions or kiss in cave-man style. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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