THE CINEMA
" Vessel of Wrath." At the Regal BY all the rule-of-thumb guesswork methods that showmanship uses to assess entertainment values, this film should be good. In the lead it has Charles Laughton. Its cast includes Elsa Lanchester, Robert Newton and—not least valuable—Tyrone Guthrie, celebrated in the more progressive centres of stage production, whose first appearance in films will be welcomed and closely scrutinised by all who knew his work at the Cambridge Festival Theatre. Its director was Erich Pommer, Germany's ace producer in the days when Ufa was at its best. Its scenarist was Bartlett Cormack, who scripted The Front Page, Fury, and many other top-line American films. And last but not least, its story is taken from one of the most forceful if uncomfortably cynical of Somerset Maugham's South Sea tales. It is clear that Mayflower Pictures, the new Pommer- Laughton production company, is determined that its films shall not fall down through lack of strength on either side of the camera. For Vessel of Wrath they have assembled a unit which, on the evidence of its members' previous records, is as good a team individually as ever took the floor in a British studio.
Yet for all its galaxy of talent Vessel of Wrath is a bad film because a stagey film. Right from the start it is cribbed, cabined and confined. The long series of opening sub-titles describing the South Sea scene and the nostalgic romance thereof makes an inauspicious beginning ; and the lifeless backgrounds, setting off these titles against a motionless sea, only serve as pointers to a stiltedness to come. The memorable opening of the American South Sea picture, Bird of Paradise, with the schooner rushing madly through the breakers into the calm water of the lagoon laid a similar atmosphere and at the same time swung the King Vidor film into action with a gusto which the English producers might have done well to study. But the main source of trouble seems to lie in the fact that in spite of individual excellences, Vessel of Wrath unit fails to pull together co-operatively. Direction and acting alike are marred by a lack of mutual confidence which not even the assurance of Laughton can dispel. He, indeed, carries nearly the whole burden of the film, and as the public-nuisance remittance-man of the Island he is first-rate. He moves through an almost visible fog of alcohol and perspiration. The active society so carefully concealed within his revolting shirt subtly emphasises his own parasitical nature. The dignity of Ascot lies in the delicate slant of his filthy boater ; in his well- mannered seduction of the female pupils of the mission school there is the cultured breeding of the English countryside. The contrast between his amiable attitude to the native popu- lation and the rude gestures and still ruder ejaculations which form the basis of his dealings with the white community is well in tune with Maugham's picture of the embittered and dissolute Ginger Ted.
By comparison, Elsa Lanchester's performance ES th2 bigoted missionary, whose fantastic sexual self-esteem Ginger Ted is unwise enough to scorn, is a somewhat over empl asiszd affair. The same is true though in lesser degree of Guthrie's portrait of the pompous, dutiful Reverend Jones, her brother ; while Robert Newton, as the Dutch contreileur, shows a tendency to forget his broken accent in moments of emotional pressure. Of the false appeal presented by the continued reappearance of a gratuitous and irritating dog the less said the better.
In the original story the community is a grotesque one : in the film it becomes still more grotesque because it cannot determine the dramatic purpose it is intended to serve. It must call a halt every now and then in an effort to unravel its own tangled psychology. Thus the final removal of happily united Ginger Ted and Martha to the proprietorship of a respectable English country pub. provides an ending as loose and improbable as Maugham's conclusion was pointed and dramatic.
With the continued storm over the new Quota Act the moment is critical for British films. If at this juncture our studios can prove their mettle, much will he done to restore City confidence in the future. Vessel of Wrath has many desirable qualities. It is sanely and economically produced ; its technical standards are high. But it lacks the vitality of the
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