The Cinema
"The World Moves Qa." At th.s. Tivoli
No perfectly sensible producer would have tried to deal with so much unwieldy material in a film of normal length. Yet the attempt was worth making, for The World Moves On, though often failing to realize fully its underlying purpose, has some unusually impressive moments. After a prelude in 1825, the story starts in 1914 and closes in 1929, following the fortunes of the Girards, a family from the Southern States who have built • up a vast cotton business with branches in Manchester, Diisseldorf and Lille. In 1914 the daughter of the French branch marries one of the German sons, and Mary Girard, of Manchester, falls in love with Richard Girard, heir to the American interests. Soon afterwards war breaks out ; and the film, besides keeping track of all the family affairs, embarks on an elaborate panorama of war- time episodes in England, France and Germany.
War scenes have often been filmed, but these—apart from the weird incursions of a comic negro who has enlisted by mistake—are as graphic as any I remember. Mary, left in charge of the Manchester factory after her father's death, refuses to make munitions, and eventually her plant is taken over by the British Government. She marries Richard, who is fighting in the French Foreign Legion; and very soon he is reported missing. These sequences are all tersely effective—there is one curiously vivid glimpse of a German town on November 11th, 1918—but later on, as the film's moral purpose emerges more clearly, it becomes far less convincing.
The story, leaping forward several years, shows us Richard, who has survived to become head of the American business, planning a world combine of cotton interests; he is intoxicated with power and prosperity, while one of the French cousins, now a Roman Catholic priest, warns him that he is selling his soul for material success. This moral is conveniently driven home by the Wall Street crash of 1929, and the film closes with a rather vague emphasis on Christianity as the one stable hope of a world torn by economic distress and threatened with new wars. It is a sincere emphasis, but I should doubt whether the true interests of Christianity, or of the pacifism for which Mary continues to stand, are likely to be very well served by a pictorial sermonizing which does not—and cannot—examine any of the deeper causes of social unrest. .
However, the interspersed news-reel extracts showing all the chief countries arming and parading are a forcible novelty ; and Captain Reginald Berkeley, the English author of the scenario, has very skilfully woven his propa ganda into a reliable dramatic pattern. The acting, too— particularly that of Madeleine Carroll as Mary and of Franehot Tone as Richard—is quietly- effective ; and the faithful reproduction of social detail, in various countries at various periods, is a triumph for the thoroughness of Hollywood's studio technique. An immense amount of careful work has, indeed, gone into this picture ; its partial failure is Worth more than easy success..
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