Cinem a
Romantic Sparks
By ISABEL QUIGLY Les Enfants du Paradis. (Academy.) — Can - Can. (Metropole, Victoria.)— Summer of the Seven- teenth . Doll. (London Pavilion.)—Lift to the Scaffold. (Cameo-Poly).- .The Green Mare's Nest. (Cameo Royal.) A REVIVAL of Marcel Carnes Les Enfants du Paradis ('A' certificate) is, to me, one of those con- sciously 'nostalgic occasions' one regards with one delighted and one sceptical, even apprehensive, eye. It rocketed into my late teens with such a Shower of romantic sparks that for years and Years it was my undisputed Top Film, the one that never wearied, that had everything: size and length (in those days I loved few things as much as looked bong evening's-worth at the cinema), what looked like a complete picture of what then seemed to me an enviably glamorous society, pal- atable cynicism and full-blast romanticism, a script that seemed to say all sorts of things one wanted to say oneself, Barrault and Arletty, mime and naturalism, love as one thought and hoped it Was; in fact, everything one wanted to think of at ,that age, in that state of mind. Rapt and ridiculous, I saw it nine times, severely cut in England, uncut in Paris, queueing in what I seem to remember as a perpetual snowstorm. I even saw (I don't know how often, four or five times) Rarrault repeating the mime on the stage, with Madeleine Renaud as the statue instead of A. rletty, and a faint feeling of disillusion because It wasn't quite as it had been. Pre'vert's script seemed as quotable as Hamlet: what could better express the essence of romantic disillusion than Barraules : histoire ahsurde et triste, comme ICI 'Menne, cornme la votre, Madame Hemline? or of romantic enchantment than Arletty's pay- off line before what seemed a rather daring fade- out : 'C'est tellement simple, l'amourn I quote from memory (so I hope they're right), for they Went into the stock of aphorisms, so barnacled With association as to be almost unrecognisable to outsiders, that one keeps to express a joke or rood of ageless validity. For years, phrases Ike 'fraiche comme la rose, pure comme le us' became jokes of the wry and moist-eyed kinxl, and the wonderful nonsense of : 'Helas, il est mord 0 misere de la vie!
Cetait un mauvais homme, mats c'etait mon . . . an!'
could be brought out to suit all sorts of occasions. Yes, it had everything, food for daydreams and identifications, excitements and swoonings, jokes of the serio-whimsi-comical kind, Barrault (I am forced to repeat) and Arletty, Pierre Brasseur, Maria Casares, Pierre Renoir, Louis Salou, Marcel Herrand and one of those casts of thousands in which everyone seems vitally concerned with living. In fact, it all looked like Living, and just as one had hoped to find it —gorgeous, intense, poignant, funny and good- ness how sad ! I wonder if the new generation that sees it for the first time now at the Academy will be starry-eyed enough to take it as straight as that. I approach my own tenth visit (an enormous way, it seems, from the ninth) with the sort of trepidation one has in the face of all sentimental journeys and long-dead love affairs.
Can-Can (director : Walter Lang : `U' certifi- cate) is disappointing because it is inordinately long (two and a half hours including eleven musical minutes before the credits and an un- necessary interval), because Gigi (even includ- ing Chevalier and Louis Jourdan) did Gay Paree so much better and because (though it takes courage to say so) I can't really take Shirley MacLaine at top frenzy for sq long, screaming like a pressure-cooker that's going to explode. As heroine or off-heroine or zany or ghastly-pathetic I love her dearly; but when she looks (much of the time) ghastly-pathetic and we are meant to take her as straight heroine, then something inside me protests and wants to give her hair a good brushing. Besides, I can't quite accept her and Sinatra in love, they're much too much of a muchness; he, as always, or nearly always, the smoothie who seems (even within the limits of a musical) to have a volcanic soul tucked away somewhere, she the surface volcano with the hidden depths. What astounds me about actors, who are supposed to be good mimics, is the fact that they can't be taught to make even a single French word sound credible. Sinatra and Miss MacLaine address each other as Fran—(as in man)—swar and See-moan, and when it comes to words like tnagnifique it's mag—(as in wag)— nefeek all the way. Can-Can is filmed in Todd AO and I can't see that it does anything for it. This process is all very fine for filming indi- vidual high jinks, things that jump out at you like switchbacks or racing cars; but when it comes to filming large-scale dances like the can can on a big stage, far from making each dancer distinct and rounded and (as with switchbacks) jumping out at you, the enormous screen seems to show them all from much the same distance and to lack a sense of individuality' altogether. It rather reminded me of an excited centipede and anything less calculated to arouse the re- quired excitement it is hard to imagine.
Others in a full week : Summer of the Seven- teenth Doll (director : Norman Leslie; 'A' cer- tificate), which I enjoyed, in spite of a soft centre and a contrived-looking ending, for an inescapable toughness and openness and tang carried over from the play; and for Angela Lansbury as the best genteelly merry widow I remember. John Mills, Ernest Borgnine and Anne Baxter all give good performances of the sort called troupers'—which means they couldn't do badly if they tried. A whiff of Australia after so much of the Home Counties does our film- going a power of good. Lift to the Scaffold: first film made by that over-rated new wavelet Louis Malle, who directed the lush_Lavers. A thriller, well acted, pretentiously directed, with every chestnut you can think of, including the undeveloped incriminating photographs, and preposterous behaviour by almost everyone, in- cluding First Murderer who plans an elaborate fake suicide in a top-floor flat and leaves the rope he climbed in at the window by hanging outside over a crowded street. Don't they keep con- tinuity girls for trifles like that? Apparently not, for our hero has to rush upstairs in the lift, on which—very literally—hangs our tale., The Green Mare's Nest (director : Claude Autant-Lara; 'X' certificate: rural pomp of the sort generally called 'bucolic,' with Bourvil, sly and self-contained. Severely cut, I imagine, be- cause I could hardly follow the plot; but that hardly matters. There's a real green mare, and an assortment of rapes, each to the tune of a merry fife band.
Previous page
