--The Cinema
"Under Two Flags." At the Tivoli "Captain January."
At the Regal
How Ouida would have loved the abandon of this picture. the 32,000 rounds of ammunition shot off into the Arizona Desert, the cast of more than 10,000 (we are told that 20,000 salary cheques were paid out, which seems a bit on the mean side), the £5,000 which insured Miss Claudette Colbert, Mr. Ronald Colman, Mr. Victor McLaglen and Miss Rosalind Russell against camel bites—a curious item this, for none of these players, as far as I could see, cane within half a mile of a camel—and, in the words of the pro- gramme : a fort 200 feet square, an Arabian oasis with eight fair-sized buildings, and a forest of transplanted date palms, two Arabian cities and a horse market and a smaller fort." The absurdities arc for once not Hollywood's : the picture does momentarily lift one into the odd dream-world .of a passionate and inexperienced lady novelist resident in
Italy. When Lady Venetia meets Sergent Victor of the oreign Legion (formerly a Guards officer and, as the news- papers put it, a West End Clubman) at the oasis at midnight and remarks, while the vox humana moans resonantly on,
" What perfect silence. One can hear the leaves move," Ouida, I am sure, would not have complained, for the vox humana must have been her perpetual background too ; whether she was writing of boat-races (" no one rowed faster than . . . ") or penning fiery letters to The Times on the subject of cruelty to animals, she must have lived at an emotional pressure to which only a Wurlitzer organ could do credit. • It was many years since I had seen the play, acted by half- starved barnstormers in a Welsh village, and I had forgotten the superb climax. Victor's company, down to their last rounds, are besieged by ten thousand Arabs in their desert fort. Help may reach them by the next noon, but they cannot withstand another attack ; the Arabs' onslaught must somehow be delayed, and Victor, dressed in Arab robes, sidles across the sand dunes to the enemy. He asks to be led to Sidi- Ben Youssiff, and in the Arab leader's presence flings off his burnous. " Don't you recognise me ? I was at Magdalen when you were up at Balliol," and the Arab chief, taking a longer look, begins to recall those forgotten Oxford days. " Of course. We met first, didn't we, at one of Professor Lake's breakfast parties. . . . " But I couldn't help being a little shocked when next morning Sidi-Ben Youssiff, whom Victor had deceived into delaying the attack with a trumped- up story of British troops in his-rear (one was loth to distrust the word of a man one had met at Professor Lake's breakfast table), announced the Legionary's fate. " You remember those soccer games we used to play. Well, this time my men are going to play on horseback and you will be the ball." This surely is the Brasenose, not the Balliol, manner.
My admiration for Miss Claudette Colbert is unbounded, even when she has to play Cleopatra or the Empress Poppaea or Cigarette, the mascot of the Legion. In this part she is a3 convincingly the passionate but pure cocotte who dies of her wounds, after a mad gallop with windblown fringe and in enchanting trousers to save the company, as Mr. Colman is an Oxford graduate in reduced circumstances. It is evident that Oulda's reputation for daring has reached her contemporaries on the British Board of Film Censors, for they have given the
p film an 'Adult Certificate, or perhaps it is the result of six chaste, sandy kisses exchanged in the desert between the mascot and the Magdalen man.
Captain January, the latest Shirley Temple picture, is sentimental, a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent. An orphan salvaged from the sea is brought up by an old lighthouse keeper. A wicked school-inspector wants to. remove . the child to an institution, and the exciting climax of the film is the competitive examination, on which the child's fate . depends, between Miss Temple and the Inspector's spotty nephew. Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigour and assurance, but some of her popu- larity seems to rest on a' coquetry quite as mature as Miss Colbert's. and • on an oddly -precocious body as voluptuous in grey-flannel trousers as-Miss Dietrich's.
GRAOAM GREENE.
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