THE CINEMA
Two weeks ago I had hard things to say about films which can find no better story subject than death or murder. I still insist there are better subjects, but Take My Life, in the scope of a murder thriller, tries to say something about life, about people rather than corpses, and so contrives to be endearing. An opera singer's husband is on trial—charged with murdering a former lover. The wife takes time off from opera to turn sleuth, searching for some way round the damning circumstantial evidence against her husband. She has nothing to go upon but the conviction that-.people's lives, when they do meet, become intertwined. Obviously the real killer had to do with the murdered girl ; therefore there must be a connection • it must be possible to find it if one searches hard enough. The links in the chase are ingeniously contrived, while the locale of the drama is pleasantly British ; a night-train journey takes us beyond the confines of stuffy London to Scotland. It is here in the North, at a small school, deserted for the holidays, that imagination is allowed free play in a novel setting.
Yet this film is unsatisfying, because it promises much. One expects of Ronald Neame, with a distinguished film photographer's career behind him, certainty of touch on the technical side ; that we get. He knows just how to make his picture and sound—the raw technics of the art—tell a good story well. But he seems too often to rely on these mere instruments to mirror personality. At the oddest moments, within a setting which is perfectly feasible as a human situation, the people are allowed to go wrong." Greta Gynt (the wife who turns detective) has to get a picture of school group from the local photographic studio: place, Scotland ; time, Sunday evening late. She knocks agitatedly at the door, and imperi- ously offers the dealer money for the photograph she wants. As anyone could have foretold, the little man invokes the sabbath, and it is patent that wild horses would not induce him to oblige her. He is the type who would have refused even the most winning of womanly wiles, yet one cannot see why this opera star sleuth, with her charmingly practical turn of mind, should not have been directed to do the natural thing—and use her freely available charms on the little Scotsman. This typifies the faults of a very creditable film ; the direction and acting go through weak patches, though the general inspiration is sound. Perhaps Greta Gynt's own performance is cryptically in tune with this ; it seems often as if she has much more capacity for acting out of the deep stuff in a situation than she allows to show.
What a delight it is to see something good, but with little streaks of uncertainty, odd roughnesses which, by reason of the goodness of the overall conception, one doesn't quite believe even as one sees them! Something which will develop and grow stronger. And how dreary to see something so absolutely certain of itself that it has the inspiration of a sucked orange. Duel in the Sun is a story of the good old days of the Wild West, done up in Technicolor for juveniles. I'm addicted to some of the Hollywood fare for juveniles; it can be a gay, circus-hearted, light-headed escape, and those who like their wild-west stories are welcome to them. But I'm hanged if I can see why this kind of thing should be dressed up, with a por- tentous commentary spoken with no pictures at the opening, as if we are going to be told a fable which holds the secret of life.
GEOFFREY BELL.
Previous page
