Cinema
Little People Under Stones
By ISABEL QUIGLY
The Gift of Love. (Carlton.) SINCE The Curse of Frankenstein ruined a perfectly good May morn- ing last year, I cannot remember seeing as nauseating a film as The Gift of Love (Director : Jean Negulesco). But the monster this time was no bandaged and bleeding Thing : it is an eight-year-old girl called Evelyn Rudie. Basically she is a normal enough looking child, with a mouthful of rather protuberant teeth, some of them missing, and two yellow pigtails; a child, in fact, whose quite horrifying effect is clearly no fault of her own but is the acquired, elaborate, immensely sophisticated effect of someone trained from babyhood, like a child acrobat. The basic child (as elusive as one of Barrie's 'might-have- beens,' for she clearly wasn't given much of a life- span) has been overlaid by the slyboots profes- sional child, who is quite unlike the old precocious film infants because she knows that precocity is not what adults want : what they want is childish- ness. 'Will you get me the number?' this highly competent young person is made to ask the tele- phone operator. 'I don't dial so good. I'm a child.'
Children can be the best film material, but they are the most easily abused. Their life as actors is short a film or two, and they grow too profes- sional. The nearest thing to a good child actor, in the professional sense, that I can remember was the French boy Robert Lynen, who was Duvivier's Foil de Carotte in the early Thirties, and grew into lanky adolescence quite successfully. The really good films about children have never made their children famous; it is the director, and rightly, who has the credit, the children being merely transitory material he handled and made filmable. For film children should never give deliberate 'performances'; they must be caught 'being,' behaving, in action, in their age group. Jean Benoit-Levy's La Maternelle, with its hundreds of terrifyingly noisy, tough, pinafored children between two and five, simply wandered among them, recording the thunder of their boots, their sniffs, their yells, their expressions. The great films about adolescence—Vigo's Zero de Conduite, Leontine Sagan's Miidchen in Uniform—handled, though much more selfconsciously, behaviour rather than performance; so did de Sica's post- war Sciuscid, about the shoeshine boys, or the minor but true picture of Italian middle-class children we saw last year, Franco Rossi's Friends for Life. To me the height of a child's film perfor- mance still seems to have been reached with Bobby Henrey in Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol. I say 'with' and not `by' Bobby Henrey because here if ever was an example of direction rather than deliberate performance. There was one place, I remember, where the boy took his pet snake out to look over the neighbouring roofs, murmur- ing, with apparent indifference ' to diction, audience, audibility, director, and everything else, `Look, Macgregor, London!' If ever one, had an illusion of looking in on childhood, there it was.
But these were serious films using children with dignity, as children and not puppets. There were plenty of puppets as well. Children were the stock- in-trade of Hollywood 'pop' films in the Thirties and early Forties, with a success it is hard to understand from this distance. There were two kinds of Hollywood children (Hollywood was the only place that really professionalised them): the nice' and the nasty, or those who were improbably pretty, graceful, charming and good, and those who were tough, plain, unhappy, and the spiritual ancestors of the present much older generation of mixed-up kids, but whom we were not, in those days, invited to sympathise with.. Queen of them all was the robust Shirley Temple, who reigned for years as quite frankly a 'cutie,' a cut-down chorus girl, with her songs and dimples and tap- dances. The Fauntleroyish Freddie Bartholomew looked neat and distinguished for a few years, and later came the first of the tidy, alarmingly self-possessed teenagers, Deanna Durbin. None of these has survived to adult acting. The opposi- tion, though, has lasted rather better, having less looks and therefore more talent in the first place. Mickey Rooney was always the antithesis of the Bartholomew boys, a strawheaded ugly urchin who made faces and got into trouble : he still does, and has survived as something of a wild comedian. Jane Withers was supposed to enhance Shirley Temple's blonde, cjean, plump little girls by show- ing us just how black, and cross a child could look; still defiantly plain but quite splendid, she was still holding her own among the pretty girls in Giant. Judy Garland used to play the stout, un- easy teenager, as opposed to Deanna Durbin's cool heroines; and Miss Garland, as we all know, is about and kicking vigorously still. When this group of children broke up, there was a gap, and it looked as if film children were on their way out. And then they turned up again, but changed, etherealised, unrecognisable !—no longer perform- ing monkeys, but grave, whimsical, fantastical little gnomes; children, in fact, as Hollywood adults saw them. The queen of these was Margaret O'Brien, and it is in her fey footsteps that this new child, Evelyn Rudie, and a lot of others sinisterly like her, walk.
The story of The Gift of Love would strain any- one, child or adult, fey or solid; as indeed it strains Lauren Bacall, an intelligent actress with a rather squashed gift for irony. It is about a childless wife who treats her husband as her child and, when she realises she is going to die at any minute, instead of supposing and hoping he may marry someone else, adopts a little girl to take over where she leaves off. At one point in the film the exasperated husband yells : 'Can't you just be a little girl?' and a few of the more dethonstrative critics were seen to wave their umbrellas. For a little girl is just what a film child, trained to a spurious little-girldom, to look small and defenceless and imaginative, and all the other things film-makers think little girls should be, can never manage to achieve. The old-style film child- ren, tap-dances, dimples and all, were marvels of realistic childhood compared with this kind. These have the grotesque inhumanity of the 'little people' who live under stones.
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