THE CINEMA
" The Hairy Ape." At the New Gallery.--" Voice in the Wind." At the London Pavilion. " Sweet and Low Down." At the Tivoli.
ON more than one recent occasion American film journals have celebrated the decease of the " legitimate" theatre. Viewed from the box-office, they assure us, the American drama has dwindled to a tiny phenomenon. Outside of New York, Philadelphia, and a few other metropolitan centres, the live performer is a rare and archaic sight. Assessed in the inevitable terms of queues on the sidewalk and dollars in the till, his calling is at the point of extinction. Fortunately the Hollywood cry of victory is premature. Some of us may even go so far as to entertain doubts—in consideration of its present elephantiasis—of the expectation of life of the fictional film itself. For whilst the widespread existence of the theatre is undoubtedly threatened by the commercial advantages of the cinema, the theatre retains functions which the cinema has so far shown no power even to comprehend. The whole matter comes into my mind as the result of attending two of this week's new releases. In The Hairy Ape we have an attempt to transfer to celluloid the quality of Eugene O'Neill's play, and in Voice in the Wind two courageous young film-makers have attempted a theme which they appear not to have recognised as being essentially of the stage rather than of the screen. In each case the result is a piece of passable entertain- ment, yet it is clear that the popular cinema is about as appropriate to the conceptions involved as a parish magazine to the serialisation of the works of Havelock Ellis. However loud may be the whoops of joy from American film magnates who see the art of Euripides and Shakespeare, of Chekhov and Ibsen, waiting cap in hand on their palatial doorsteps, the fact remains that the celluloid impresario is working in an immature medium which still is organised to be stronger in dollars than in.thought and the subtler forms of emotional expression. So it is that Mr. William Bendix, in The Hairy Ape's name part, finds himself compelled to ignore the sociological and most of the psychological significance of the O'Neill drama and.to present us instead with the comforting conclusion that industrial slavery is as pleasant as the idle luxuries of the rich for the reason that fornication is a similar activity on both levels. In his per- formance and in that of Miss Susan Hayward as the idle and immoral society girl who tortures him, I detect many signs of a more mature interpretation of the theme, but the producers were clearly so terrified of getting out of their depth that we are com- pelled for the most part to paddle about in very shallow water. In this film and in Voice in the Wind it also becomes clear that the commercial cinema has as yet found no consistently acceptable' manner of presenting devices of stylisation and symbolism which are commonplace in the theatre. When the stoker of Mr. O'Neill's cargo-boat is roaring out his fanatical conviction that it is the muscles of his great body which drive the ship, we are not deceived in the theatre into supposing that his every appearance in the stoke- hold .is actually accompanied by the rantings and ravings of a lunatic, nor that our theme is concerned with a ship so much as with society. It is the inner voice of the proletariat which is given on the stage this stylised expression. The aim pf screen backgrounds, however, is to be ultra-realistic and against them a shouting stoker becomes no more and certainly no less than a stoker shouting. The director of The Hairy Ape, faced with this problem, appears to have overlooked the cinema's special powers of magnification, its ability to present close-up portraits which will communicate subtleties of facial expression impossible to the stage. The stage represented the stokers' emotion with shouts and extravagant gestures: the screen might well have achieved the same purpose with the throb of a vein or the roll of an eye. Yet it remains true that such plays demand settings essentially non-realistic and if the cinema is to venture into these difficult regions (where its vast world audience may in any case be disinclined to follow) it must look again to such stylised masterpieces as The Cabinet of Dr. Cagliari.
Voice in the Wind is the story of a refugee couple separated by the Gestapo in Prague and reunited in death on the island of Guadaloupe. The setting is mist-wreathed and sinister. Mad and murderous figures creep amongst the shadows, and snatches of evocative music play upon the imaginations of the pining characters. The actors strike dramatic poses which they hold far too long for the impatient movie-camera, and what was intended to be significant becomes merely slow. This is an essay in " atmosphere" and in symbolism essentially non-realistic and it derives directly from the expressionistic theatre of the twenties. There are many effective moments of genuine drama, but clearly Voice in the Wind, like The Hairy Ape, belongs to aesthetic territory still to be explored by some intrepid Hollywood pioneer. The exploration may prove unprofitable but until it has been attempted it is too early to say that the theatre is dead.
Sweet and Low Down tells how Mr. Benny Goodman's swing band found a new trombone player in the Chicago slums, suppressed his early egotism and turned him into a good trouper. Apart from some acceptable comedy, particularly from Mr. Jack Oakie, the story might have been dispensed with. Mr. Goodman's clarinet playing is, however, technically remarkable, his band expresses a genuine American joie de vivre, and the whole style of their ultra- respectable music represents as good a white man's bowdlerising of coloured man's music as one could wish to hear.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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