STAGE AND SCREEN
THE CINEMA
-Young Mr. Lincoln." At the Leicester Square Theatre. " I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany." At Studio One.
AT the best of times Young Mr. Lincoln would be impres- sive, and entitle Mr. John Ford, who made The Informer and Stagecoach, to be regarded as one of the best directors of the day, but now there seems an added value in this attempt to draw in the simplest and least rhetorical terms a man who cared passionately for justice.
We see Lincoln first as a storekeeper exchanging goods for a cask-full of old books which include Blackstone : his love for Anne Ruttledge is touched in with unexpected re- straint—an inarticulate dualogue on a river bank and a monologue over a grave. We watch him begin his career as a lawyer, take part in the small town celebrations of Inde- pendence Day, win a log-splitting contest, defeat an opposing team at tug-of-war by hitching the rope to a mule cart, judge with extreme deliberation in a pie contest between the merits of apple and peach. Mr. Henry Fonda gives a fine per- formance; the grotesque slow wisecracks seem to emerge from a whole background of country breeding, and Mr. Ford and his cameraman never let us forget the odd leggy appearance —an interesting example of what camera angles can do with a young actor as well-made as Mr. Fonda. Mr. Fonda's performance has been compared with Muni's as Pasteur— certainly we never feel that the acting falls below the legendary nature of the subject, and he has none of the mannerisms which grate on us a little .with Muni. But it must be remembered that the direction is far finer, and much of the credit we give to Fonda belongs to Ford. That flash of fanatical hatred in the eyes when a man pays him in bad coin is less a matter of acting than of cutting, and much of Mr. Fonda's expressiveness is montage. But all the same it is not every actor who allows himself to be so cut and mounted into his part by a great director.
The main part of the plot is, I imagine, fictitious. That doesn't really matter : this is intended to be legend, not history, and it may have been impossible to discover in the events of the early life a single incident which could bear the weight of the whole future. So we have a story of two simple country boys who are suddenly on Independence Day caught up in the murder of a bully : they each for the other's sake admit guilt, and their mother, who thought she saw the stab- bing, will not say which of her sons struck the blow—tor- tured by her appalling knowledge, she won't save one at the expense of the other. The scene of the fight, taken in the half-dark from a long way off, the little swaying group under the trees, the dull gunshot as the bully fires, then the bush of smoke standing still over the body, the two children (they are little more) running together to their mother's side, all obscurity and hurry and muffled sound, will remain in mind as a classic example of direction which does more than directly represent an action, direction which conveys a mood.
Lincoln saves them from lynching, undertakes their defence, and the opening stages of the trial are particularly well written : the direction of the little country judge, " Now, you men, take off your hats and put down those jugs "; the choosing of the jury. The climax is the only weak point in the film. For Lincoln to discover that a witness for the prosecution is the real murderer (from a point in his evidence which would not have escaped any member of the audience) is banal. There have been so many court dramas and in- genious plots, and for a while the picture loses its legendary interest, and we find ourselves concerned with an exciting situation and not with a man who, loving justice and hating iniquity, was preparing himself for his last defeat at the hands of a violent world.
I Was a Captive of Nazi Germany is the story of Miss Isobel Steele, a young American journalist who was imprisoned in 5934 on a charge of espionage. It is an odd shabby picture, with cheap sets and nameless players of indeterminate nation- ality, full of queer accents and queerer dinner jackets. Miss Steele plays Miss Steele as if she was sleep-walking, a lanky figure in a shapeless skirt protesting innocence to blond fanatics. As propaganda it is as complete a failure as Dr. Goebbels's : the only emotion it arouses is hilarity.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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