THE CINEMA
THE way is less long from China to Stockholm than is the imaginative distance between these two pictures. One is about. life and the other is about—what ? I find it hard to say, but certainly not life. One is simple and direct and true : it catches successfully that legendary quality Mr. Flaherty failed to put into Man of Aran : the characters are shown in incidents common to their class and race, a marriage, a famine, a revolu- tion; the other is composed (unwise policy even for a thriller) of incidents which never happened to anybody yet : a kind of collage of old Lyceum dramas and Drury Lane dialogue.
The Good Earth is the story of a Chinese peasant farmer, how he marries a wife, who is a slave in the Great House, has chil- dren, adds field to field ; how drought comes and kills his crops and cattle, how he refuses to sell his land, though his family starves, how they trek south to the city. A revolution quite meaningless to them sweeps through the town, his wife is caught up in a mob and flung through a looted palace, luck saves her incomprehensibly from a fien; squad, luck leaves in her hands a bag of jewels. Understanding nothing of what it is all about they can go back to their land, and Miss Luise Rainer's beautiful performance, the stupid stuck-out lips, the scared, uncalculating and humble gaze, convey all the peasant's fear of hope, of the envious gods, the oriental equivalent of the touched wood, the salt over the shoulder. "My daughter is of no account" (and a hand shields the son's face from the dangerous heavens) "and ugly with smallpox." Mr. Muni's performance is not of the same quality, he exaggerates his chinoiserie, it is Miss Rainer and the character she presents who carries the film : the awful pathos of the wedding walk from the Great House at the heels of the bridegroom she has never seen, the scrabbling in the ditch for the peach stone he has spat out (from it a tree may grow ) ; toiling heavy with child in the fields to save the harvest from the hurricane ; her proud and ceremonial return to the Great House to show her son to the Ancient One ; in the long drought taking the knife to the ox her husband fears to kill (" Infirm of purpose, give me the dagger," in acting like Miss Rainer's we become aware of the greatest of all echoes). The drought marks the highest point of the film. Like clear exact epithets the images stab home : the plough jammed in the rocky soil, the vultures on the kid's carcase, the dark sullen stare of the starved child.
Afterwards the picture becomes a little less than life. Some- thing goes wrong with story and direction when the farmer has returned to his land with the loot and bought the Great House : too much plot-making, too many cinematic themes (father against son, love against lust) : not even the big set piece of the locust plague saves the last hour from banality and ennui. The peasant is no longer legendary : he is no longer any peasant who marries and suffers and endures : he is a character called so-and-so who becomes astoundingly rich and loves a dancing girl, who loves his son whom he turns out of his home, and so on and so on, plot running away with subject, life left behind in those magnificent earlier reels.
"Abandon life all ye who enter here " : the pedestrian unreality of most Denham pictures lies over this spy drama directed by Mr. Victor Saville, about a fashionable dressmaker in Stockholm who work's for the German secret service when all the time she is in French pay. Mr. Saville directed The W. Plan, a good thriller, but he is defeated by the incredible naivety of this script. "Fig leaves were good enough for Eve and she was the first lady in the land." So runs the wicked cosmopolitan dialogue. "You love me—why are you trying to resist ? I want to take you away from here," and the Count's monocle glitters. There is one superb moment of anti-climax when the Germans accuse the heroine of bringing false informa- tion about French movements at Verdun. She pleads ner- vously: "But wasn't there an attack ? " to receive the stern reply, "Yes, but our troops stopped the wrong one." The heroine is rescued by a Q ship in the nick of time from a German submarine, and the final shot is of two small and dubious ships on a waste of water. One of them hoots derisively, and to that maritime " raspberry " the film fittingly fades out.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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