THE CINEMA
" Johnny Frenchman." At the Leicester Square Theatre.
HERE is a film which combines conventional sentiment, topical propaganda and authentic settings without quite making the most of any of these assorted ingredients. The story is of the peace-time rivalry between a Cornish fishing village and its counterpart on the Brittany coast and how war came to settle the quarrel between the Cornishman and the Frenchman who were wooing the British harbour-master's daughter. By including in its cast Francoise Rosay as a matriarch from Brittany, the film challenges comparison with the French screen approach to village romance, and there are delight- ful moments when the distinguished French actress has no need to be ashamed of her surroundings. The French feast-day with the religious procession winding along the harbour wall, the dancing and the Cornish wrestling tournament all match in conviction the genuine and beautiful scenic backgrounds against which they are photo- graphed. And Tom Walls as the bluff and insular harbour-master is a fit opponent for Madame Rosay in the cross-Channel rivalries. He acts with power, feeling and a sense of comedy which is ever wary of the yawning precipice of farce. What, then, is lacking? It is not simply that the parallel threads of melodrama, sentiment and comedy are finally brought together into a fearsome tangle of float- ing mines, secret cross-Channel missions and a raging storm. It seems to be rather that the English film has failed where a French film would magnificently have succeeded, namely, in the dovetailing ,of plot and background. Here are the Cornish pubs and the pleasant domestic interiors of the fishermen's cottages, but inhabiting them are actors who must speak lines dictated by the creaking devices of scenario continuity. Neither their .lines nor their behaviour grow naturally from their surroundings. They are creatures of the type- writer superimposed upon a natural setting which obstinately con- flicts with them in rhythm and philosophy. I am sure that a French film company would have utilised the scenes of feasting and carousal, the wrestling and the fishing, as something more than atmospheric background. The characters would truly have sweated with these exertions ; their faces would have been soiled with the dirt of Brittany and Cornwall, not shining with all the unguents of the beauty parlour. 7ohnny Frenchman is a good-looking, friendly, entertaining film, but it smells neither of the sea nor of the fisher- man's pub. Its makers must be congratulated on their generous use of natural backgrounds, and it is a pity that in their commendable expedition to the West they failed to shake off the niceties of Ealing.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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