"The Garden of Allah." At the Leicester Square Theatre 'Confetti."
At the Acadehiy--- Walt Disney Season. --At the Tatler Ma. CHARLES Dolma, a renegade monk from a Trappist Monastery in North Africa, Miss Marlene Dietrich, a lovely orphan heiress suffering from world weariness (" Go to the desert," she is told at the convent school to which she returns for advice and prayer. "In the face of the infinite your grief will lessen ") meet in a Moroccan dance hall. A desert soothsayer does his best to warn the woman against her doom ("I see a camel by a church door, and then a tent in the far desert," as he describes it with surrealist fervour); and so does the local Catholic priest, who distrusts this man who is apt to stagger uneasily back at the sight of a crucifix. "This is the land of fire," he says, "and you are a woman of fire." Nobody talks less apocalyptically than that : the great abstractions come whistling hoarsely out in Miss Dietrich's stylised, weary, and monotonous whisper, among the hideous teehnicolour flowers, the yellow cratered desert like Gruyere cheese, the beige faces. Startling sunsets bloom behind silhouetted camels „very much as in the gaudy little pictures which used to *be_on sale on the pavements of Trafalgar Square. Needless to say—but many thousand feet of film are expended in saying it—the pair are married by the Catholic priest (according to the Church of England service), and there, waiting for them outside the church door, is The Camel; the foredoomed camel, ready to carry them, with an escort of twenty-five armed Arabs, on -their honeymoon—to that Tent in the Far Desert. There Fate has a coincidence in store for them in the person of a French officer lost in the Sahara with his men. "We are a lost patral," - he succinctly explains to the lady in a low backed evening dress who is was a lighted torch from the top of a ruined tower (the surrealism of this film is really magnificent). He recognises the forrier monk (he had been a guest. in the monastery), and sitting together on the Gruyere cheese, silhouetted like camels, the Livers make the great decision to renounee6411. ,The Catholic priest (Mi. Aubrey Smith, who has .lett a straight county bat to the bodyline. bowling) shakes hands all round at die railway station, the Monk slowly wends his Way up an avenue of cypresses, a grey glove flaps from the window of a four- wheeler. Alas ! my poor Church, so picturesque, so noble, so superhumanly pious, so intensely dramatic. I really prefer the New Stateiman vie*, shabby priests counting pesetas on their fingers in dingy cafés &fore blessing tanks. Even the liqueur made at this Traimist monastery is Mysterious. Only one monk at a time knows the secret Of its making, and When Mr. Charles Boyer disappears from the Monastery the secret is irrecoverably lost. The thought that this sweet and potent drink will be Once again obtainable during Remised Ithurs
mitigates for us the agony of the parting. '
Confetti, after a bad -opening, is not quite'Vo deVtistatingly cheery as most Austrian films. It is true there are a 'OM many balloons and paper streamers at the Carnival Ball (When will producers realise there is no more dismal sight for the outsider than that of others riotously and incompre- hensibly enjoying themselves ), but the course of events which follow the presence there of a priggish and miserly professor, the proprietor of a big store who should have been elsewhere on business, and a girl from the dress department who has borrowed an exclusive model, becomes quite agreeably entangled. No film with Hans Moser and Leo Slesak coUld
.fail to have human as well as humorous momenta.'
The Tatler Theatre,. it should be noted by .unfortunate
parents confused by the " A " certificates and the incom- prehensible moral distinctions of our censors, has begun its Christmas Disney season. Next week's selection contains three of the best of the late Disneys : Moving Day, Mickey's Grand Opera, with Donald Duck as Romeo and-Pluto pitiably badgered by a conjurer's top hat, and the charming Three Orphan Kittens. Walt Disney, after a very bad period (Mickey's Polo Match was perhaps his nadir) has recovered some of his old freshness, and I would highly recommend The Country Cousin, which supports with some difficulty The Garden of Allah at the Leicester Square Theatre.
GRAHAM GREENE.
Previous page
