THE CINEMA
ALTHOUGH here there is ample scope for whimsy and boundless opportunity for sentimentality, The Big Heart, beating with com- mendable caution, manages to avoid the more obvious traps, and gives us a simple humorous tale about, of all people, Father Christmas. Mr. Edmund Gwenn is quite positive he is Kris Kringle, although everybody else knows he has come out of a home for slightly poggle old gentlemen • but in the face of their disbelief he exudes such an aura of jovial benevolence, he is so good and so kind, praising virtue and rebuking evil with equal energy, that he does finally come to symbolise the spirit of Christmas, a spirit, we are told, now moribund. Miss Maureen O'Hara, publicity woman at Macy's Stores, hires him to sit in the toy department to promote the sales, and the dear old man, thinking only of the children's happiness, has a lovely time telling their mothers to go to other stores where they will get far redder fire engines and infinitely sharper skates. This apparently, but not I confess obviously, so increases the feeling of general goodwill that Macy's sales rise to astronomic heights. Having hit the store psychiatrist on the head with his walking-stick in a fit of justifiable rage, Father Christmas is removed to an asylum and thence to a court of law where his plea of sanity is defended by Mr. John Payne Miss O'Hara's young man. The court scene constitutes one of the most pleasing entertainments I have seen for a long time. It is conducted in perfect solemnity, and its findings prove that legally, if not perhaps quite ethically, Santa Claus does exist and that without a doubt Mr. Edmund Gwenn is he.
A Man About the House is a story by Francis Brett Young of two young spinsters who, while earning a precarious living as school- mistresses in North, or it may be West, Bromwich, are left an Italian villa with all that it contains. Its most valuable content is an Italian major-domo, a lusty youth with black wavy hair and a guitar. His main desire, and he has subsidiary ones, is to become one of the landed gentry, and under the influence of his magnetic charm coupled with the relaxing southern climate and the yin extrao; dinaire, Miss Margaret Johnstone doffs her black bombazine, fluffs out her hair and falls in love with him. They marry, and Mr. Keiron Moore proceeds to poison her.
Miss Johnstone is a fine actress, and her transition from the prudish into the passionate was accomplished with plausible moderation. Miss Dulcie Gray, as her sister, fluttered around in a nit-witted way without becoming irritating ; indeed her timidity punctuated by despairing bursts of courage was rather touching. Mr. Moore was so overwhelmingly virile, flashing his teeth and baring his chest to such obvious purpose, that for all his ability I instinctively recoiled. But that is a personal matter. There were two admirably etched studies by Mr. Felix Aylmer and Dame Lilian Braithwaite of two fork-tongued English residents, and Mr. Guy Middleton made an amiable doctor. Added to which the sunshine poured down on the vineyards wherein an oddly youthful and vocal populace kissed
and harvested with equal abandon. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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