The Cinema

"The Bride of Frankenstein." At the Tivoli.—"Abyssinia." At the Rialto

Poon harmless Mary Shelley, when she dreamed that she was watched by pale, yellow, speculative eyes between the curtains of her bed, set in motion a vast machinery of. bogus, horror,:a wilderness of cardboard sets, of mouthing actors, of sound systems and trick shots and yes men. It rolls on indefinitely, that first dream and the first elaboration of it in her. novel,- Frankenstein, gathering silliness and solemnity as it goes ; •

presently, I have no doubt, it will be colour-shot and televised ; later in the Brave New World to liepolue a smelly. But the

one genuine moment of horror, when Mrs. Shelley saw the yellow eyes, vanished long ago ; and there is nothing in 7'he Bride of Frankenstein at the Tivoli to scare a child. ; „ This is not Mrs. Shelley's dream, but the dream, of a, coin- mittee of film executives who wanted to go one better than

Mrs. Shelley and let Frankenstein create a second monster froM the churchyard refuge, a woman this time, forgetting that the horror of the first creation is quite lost when it is 'repeated, and that the breeding of monsters can become no more 'exciting

than the breeding' of poultry. In a prologue to the lilni Mrs. Shelley tells Byron' and' her husband, who has been writing Poetry rapidly by the fireside, that she has imagined a 'sequel to her. novel. " To think," says Byron, " that this little head contains such horrors."

But it is unfair to Mrs. Shelley to include the old school tie among the horrors in her little head. Baron Frankenstein wears it with his Harris tweeds, and his school crest is embroi- dered on his dressing gown. Mr. Colin Clive acts the part with a sturdy old Rugbeian flavour (" This heart won't do," he says to a rather scrubby fag, " fetch me another "), which was

more suitable to ,Tourney's lend than a Gothic romance. Willis is a pompous, badly acted film, full of absurd anachronisms and

inconsistencies. It owes its one moment of excitement less

to its director than to the strange electric beauty of Miss Elsa Lanchester as Frankenstein's second monster. Her scared

vivid face, like the salamander of Mr. De La Mare's poem, her bush of hardly human hair, might really have been created by means of the storm-swept kites and the lightning flash.

It has been a week, as far as fiction is conderned, of the second-rate and the transient. The Glass Key, 'at the Plaza, unimaginatively gangster, and No More Women, at the Empire, slickly " problem," though brightened by the'acting of Mr. Charlie Ruggles, have Come and gone and call for no comment. The best filth in LOridon is AbySsinia at the Rialto,

the finest travel film I have seen, made by a Swigs expedition and explained in an admirably plain commentary. Here is

the last mediaeval state in all its squalor (the flies swarming round the eyes and nostrils as though they were so much exposed meat in a butcher's shop), its dignity (the white-robed noble- men flowing into the-capital followed by their armed retainers, the caged symbolic liens, and the Lion of Judah himself, his dark cramped' dignity, his air of a thousand years of breeding), its democratic justice (the little'courts by the roadgide,-on the railway track ; the debtor and creditor chained together ; the murderers led off to execution: by the relatives of the mur- dered). Thig film, alas, may prove the last record of an independent Abyssinia. It leaves you with a vivid sense of

something very old, very dusty, very cruel, but something

dignified in its dirt and popular in its tyranny and PerhapS'more worth preserving than the bright slick strearnlined civilisation Which threatens it. I don't' refer particularly to Italy; but to the whole tone of 'a -Him whose popular art is on the level of The Bride of Priinkenslei It.

• . In the Suburbs. and Country

Wings in the Dark may be sentimental and improbable, but it is as exciting as it is naïve. Miss Myrna Loy is well worth seeing as 'a ballyhoo airwoman '; she is one of the few actresses who can net tenderness. Here she is saved at the end • of a disastrims. Atlantic flight by. the blind inventor of a mechanical pilot.

Car 9 is more competent and more conventional. • -A quick exciting crime film, -it- misses, the level • of the •thee classical Paul Muni films or' even of G Alen. .These wero!.social criticism, as