THE CINEMA
Once Upon a Time." At the Gaurnont and Marble Arch Pavilion. ‘, Home in Indiana." At the Odeon.
nce Upon a Time starts in the vein of gentle fantasy ("Pull a chair and relax," begs the opening title), but degenerates into clumsy mixture of melodrama and whimsy. This is a pity, because e story is admirable. It deals with a dancing caterpillar .named Curly," the property of a nine-year-old boy. pnsconced in an Id boot-box, with a peep-hole in one end, this insect only indulges as terpsichorean propensities When its young trainer plays "Yes, r, that's my baby" on a mouth-organ. By chance a noted im- resario, on whom, as is apparently so common in the United ales, the banks are about to foreclose, comes across the boy and s pet, and sees in them the chance to recoup his fortunes in a aze of publicity. At first nobody, not even the journalists, will ieve his story ; but eventually a kindly radio commentator uses as the basis for a sermon after the news ; and forthwith every- y becomes Curly-conscious. After the usual trouble with the y's sister (he is, had you guessed? an orphan), the impresario gets s way, even confounding a set of eminent lepidopterists who test caterpillar's abilities under the most scientific conditions, only to proved wrong when the mouth-organ starts up.
But the only way, apparently, to turn the insect to financial aunt is to sell it to Mr. Walt Disney for one hundred thousand liars ; and the impresario has promised the boy shall never be rted from it. It is here that the fantasy collapses. The im- esario becomes very callous, even going so far as to knock the Y down. The caterpillar escapes from its boot-box, and vanishes. ere is estrangement, misery, and a vast collection of film clichés, fore the grand final reconciliation scene at which the caterpillar erges from the piano as (surely you hadn't guessed this?) a tterflv.
011e reason why this film fails to hang together is probably that exander Hall, who directed it, has failed to decide whether to te himself wholly to the child's viewpoint or to the adult's. other reason, perhaps, is the almost permanent failure of Holly- to put children satisfactorily on the screen. One has only to Pare the American efforts with those of the French, as in de Conduite and La Maternelle, or the Germans, as in Emile the Detectives, or the Russians, as in Lone White Sail, to realise measure of this extraordinary disability. Nevertheless, within limits of the American style, Ted Donaldson acts well as the , and is well supported by Cary Grant as the impresario and es Gleason (always welcome) as his manager. With a reticence e in American films, the caterpillar itself never appears.
Home In Indiana is what they call a formula picture. This means, in effect, that you know the entire story five minutes after
the film has begun, and thereafter must beguile yourself as best you can by laying side-bets on the order in which the various inci- dents will come. The mise-en-scene is a racing stable devoted to the training of trotters. There is an orphan boy who regenerates a despairing old trainer, and, of course, wins the big race in the end ; a slender love story, in which even the vamp is baby-faced and pure- souled ; and many good-looking horses. Walter Brennan, as the old trainer, gives a solid repertory performance but there is a piece of lunatic miscasting which has provided the part of an Indian hausfrau for, of all people, Charlotte Greenwood. Youth and beauty are adequately represented by a trio of newcomers, named (in case you are interested) Lon Macallister, Jeanne Crain and June Haver.
It is depressing to find so dull a film directed by Henry Hathaway, whose superb drama of the Alaskan salmon fisheries Spawn of the North, showed him to be an artist of great sensibility. There is indeed only one moment of real movie in the whole film, and that is when the unsophisticated young man gazes through a ballroom window and sees a rout of his contemporaries revealing the benefits of wealth and education in a frenzied jitteibug session—a scene shot with a cool, probing, malicious eye, and with considerable instinct for the dramatic ; so much so, indeed, that it hardly belongs to the rest of the film. Otherwise it looks as though Hathaway was dis- heartened by the story ; at any rate, even the Technicolor is rather flat, and reminds us that if, as seems certain, colour will soon super- sede black and white altogether, something will have to be done about Mother Nature's undue lavishness with the colour green.
Indeed, it is clear that the use of colour has created more problems of cinematic composition than has yet been fully realised. That colour can be consistently successful throughout an entire film has been several times demonstrated, notably in Northwest Passage and Drums Along the Mohawk. But too often it achieves merely a picture post-card flatness which is not removed by occasional splurges of autumn tints, jockeys' silks, golden hair, or the gleaming flanks of horses.
BASIL WRIGHT.
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