THE CINEMA "Der Herrscher." At the Berkeley - "We from Kron- stadt."
At the Academy
IT is pleasant to see good work again from the studios of Germany and Russia. But neither of these films, in spite of their many excellent qualities, can displace in our memories the great early days of Ufa or the first tremendous impact of Eisenstein's genius in The Cruiser Potemkin. Both can be warmly recommended to intelligent people who feel like an evening at the films ; neither achieves the " not to be missed " standard which justifies us in dragging our friends away from more reasonable pursuits into the cave of shadows.
To describe the Berkeley as a cave is unkind, for it is an elegant little addition to the ranks of London's Continental cinemas. But I beg the management, if they wish to emulate the consummate amenities of the Curzon, to attend to two things : the quality of the supporting programme and the quality of the sound. The facetious commentator is always bad enough ; but at the Berkeley his inanities expounded for close on half an hour a fearful exhibition of vulgarity called an " Aquatic Short." As for sound, this part of technical equipment often lags so far behind the rest that we must suppose managers to be mainly tone-deaf. In Der Herrscher the sound was so magnified and distorted that the whole emotional effect was disturbed : in a film lavish enough in any case of bad temper it was unfortunate that everyone seemed to be shouting instead of talking, and that doors could never shut without slamming. Let the gentle heroine merely cut a few flowers in her garden, and each snick rang through the theatre like a pistol shot.
Emil Jannings, now artistic director of the German film industry, has chosen a typical part for himself in the film version of Gerhardt Hauptmann's Vor Sonnenuntergang. He plays the chief of a great iron works, who after his wife's death finds a renewal of his life in the love of a secretary who appears to be thirty or forty years his junior. His selfish family, horrified at the situation, apply for a certificate of insanity. Though he is obviously quite sane, it appears that under German law such an application involves guardianship pendente lite. The realisation of this indignity and of the hideous cruelty of his family drives him into a sudden display of Berserk rage which is indeed insane. This collapse hardly seems to be psychologically probable, though there is no denying the sheer effectiveness of Jannings on the rampage. A happy ending shows the great man restored to health and dictating to his beloved a will leaving his money to the State for scientific experiment—an unexceptionable moral but for the fact that the object of experiment is to be, not the promotion of science or of human welfare, but the provision of resources that shall render the State self-sufficient in war.
In its solid way the film is impressive enough, and the opening —a long sequence showing a rain-drenched funeral—is really eloquent. The family are neatly characterised, and there is a fine performance of a neurotic daughter by an actress who cannot be identified owing to the absurd system of only showing the cast at the beginning. Marianne Hoppe, as the secretary, is a Hepburn-ish creature ; she gives an impression of youth and sincerity, which is all she is asked to do in the way of acting.
Finally, for those who love the dear old German language, there is the joy of hearing the words " Mutters Schmuck " (" mother's jewels ") repeated in twenty different tones of anger and agony. We from Kronstadt is not surreptitious but undisguised propaganda. It relates an episode in the civil war of 1919: the rout of the White forces, at the gates of Petrograd, by the sailors of Kronstadt. Of its merits as history I am unable to judge ; but all students of Russia must be interested in its demonstration of Russian behaviour in emergencies : the public apologia, for example, with which each volunteer justifies his worthiness to serve the party. The old wonder arises how anything ever gets done at all in Russia, even a revolution.
There is much beautiful photography, some fine acting, and a harrowing scene in which captured Red sailors are flung over a cliff-top to save ammunition. But at the end they get their own back tooth for tooth, and there is no suggestion that anyone on either side is at all worried by the necessity for such
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