CINEMA
"Faust and the.Devil." (Berkeley.)
Ur to Tuesday afternoon of this week there was no doubt in my mind and, I hoped, no doubt in the minds of film-producers, that canned opera was a failure. I have seen three or four attempts to transfer opera to the screen, and each, I think, was more ghastly than the last ; visually rather ridiculous, as opera is bound to be, and aurally hideous. Surely in this day of mechanical perfection the sound track is something of a laggard. Not only does it amplify everything to swimming-bath strength but it also hisses like a gaggle of irritable geese. Normally we hardly notice this. We are used to its metallic speaking voices, and, unless they are overwhelmingly forte, to its songs called " What do they do in Cuba?" or " Until you came." They are part of our lives like the distortions of our wireless sets and the discordances of all but the most expensive gramophones. When it comes to opera, though, it is another matter, ai is it also in the case of orchestral symphonies and piano concertos ; perhaps I should say piano concerto as only one, by Rachmaninoff, is ever played. Somehow the peculiar resonance of the classics, amplified to proportions which seem to envelop one in a throbbing gong, is nearly always insupportable.
It is therefore with honest amaiement that I must record a success in the opera line, at the Berkeley. Gounod's Faust, sung in Italian by M. Gino Mattera in the name part, Mme. Onelia Fineschi as an off-screen Marguerite (with a beautiful blonde Mme, Nelly Corradi mouthing sweet nothings on it) and M. Italo Tajo as a superb Mephistopheles, has been so artistically, and also so sensibly, directed by M. Carmine Gallone that one is beguiled from first to last. M. Gallone seems to have turned his face away from the traditions and influences of stage opera, and he happily whisks Gounod's arias about so that they come in spontaneous bursts at
appropriate moments, rather as though this were an original screen- play with original screen music. The photography is always good, sometimes exceptionally so ; the action is always fluid, and though one cannot altogether deny the presence of the geese in the swimming-bath, they seem to be less irascible than usual and the bath smaller. Altogether, a pleasant surprise. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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