The Cinema "Ernte:" At the Academy "Manhattan Madness." At the
Regal—" Love From a Stranger." At the London Pavilion IT'S always supposed to indicate a keener sensibility to be sniffy about the beauty conventions of one's own day and age.
When Dr. Johnson was asked what he thought about the London beauties of the time and their habit of making up their faces, he replied : " I don't like to see an Englishwoman sailing under French colours:" - Me, I've tried to keep up with the movement and I get along all right just so long as they keep Carole Lombard in long-shot. But the moment she's in close-up, I can't swing it. One glimpse of the impudent nostrils, the swelling bosom, and I'm a stricken man. This may be " conventional beauty " to • the intelligentsia, but I never yet minded being in a house with a beauty; however conventional. Yet this fault has its compensa- tions. I can look on, for instance, with comparative calm, at practically any Central European with frizzy hair, thighs like market-day, and a silk ribbon tied in a bow round the middle of her evening gown. My appetite may be low and panting, being content to watch merely Myrna Loy and Ginger Rogers moving about up there, but I feel no restless urge, like more intelligent critics, for a Viennese actress with a thirty-five waist and eyebrows that meet in the middle.. Anybody with my gross standards cannot hope, therefore, to judge Paula Wessely. Of course, she's a good actress, she's sincere and calculates her naivety very cleverly, and is downright and plucky through her peasant tears. On paper, she's fine. But she's not acting on paper. She's acting in a dark room on a dark night with a lot of people sneezing and at least one film critic risking 'fiu on her behalf. And sincerity is not enough. Neither is clever acting, and cute horseplay, and stirring feudal devotion to the Rittmeister, and brave tears. Any other time she'd be given marks for all these things. But they were nothing short of a stab in the back, the night she gave me influenza.
Manhattan Madness is kinder to the rheum and its conven- tions are less nostalgic. It's a crisp, incredible newspaper story in the credible fairyland which Hollywood so cun- ningly represents as Manhattan. But for all it's only a conversation, along with the balloons and the gaiety in Viennese films, the policemen and Cockney moustaches in Hitchcock films, it's more plausible than most and has a life of its own. Joel McCrea works in a newspaper office that looks like one, his Press Club might be a press club. he takes recognisable taxis and blows steaming coffee, sitting up at two in the morning on a stool at quick-lunch bars with Jean Arthur, who's as husky and friendly as any New Yorker we know. - Though the story is nothing, and the pace-seemed slowed the night I was there, because the sound track was being played too low, it was this Hollywood convention that made the evening, the visual convention of a New York that is nearer the New York of Ed Sullivan than Ernie is anywhere near Vienna or Hungary, than Lore From a Stranger is near the Bayswater it supposedly starts out from. It's. the background of Manhattan Madness that cheers and stimulates, whereas it's the background of Love Front A Stranger that for more than half the film gets in time way of a first-rate melodrama. Trafalgar Films, Ltd., do their part to scotch these nasty rumours about the local film industry by introducing us to Ann Harding as an object of pity, a poor working girl living in a flat that would cost, at a modest guess, about six hundred a year. Our hopes pick up when she wins a sweepstake and when Basil Rathbone, his cultivated brow pained at the mention of " guide-books," offers to show her a strange, lovely Europe, personal " out-of-the-way places. Mr. Rathbone's untrodden ways take in the Champs Ely sees, the Folies Bergeres, Rome, Cannes, a suite at the Dorchester, and—believe it or not—a " place " in Kent. Ws only when Miss Harding is finally locked in that cottage in Kent, with no hope of escaping to Stratford-on-Avon, the Taj Mahal, or Killarney that. the movie can 'settle into a single episode of beautifully developed and well-written
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