THE CINEMA
" Pygmalion." At the Leicester Square " The Lady Van- ishes." At the Empire
Boris these films are a welcome reminder that we have in this country both the talent and the imagination to turn out a product essentially British and quite definitely good ; while the fact that we make so few good films in comparison with France or America becomes all the more pointed by the fact that they are both of them first class of their kind.
The most important thing about Pygmalion is that it repre- sents a triumph for Anthony Asquith, whose sincere cinematic sensitivity has been all too neglected by producers in recent years. The work of transferring a work so essentially uncine- matic as Shaw's Pygmalion to the fluid terms of the screen is something from which a less assured spirit might well shrink. Like the bulk of Shaw's work, there is a completely static and stagey feeling to the story ; it depends largely on good acting and on well-timed interplay of dialogue ; and worse still, at times it dates horribly—especially as regards the character of Doolittle pere, which many may feel might well have been excised altogether, and which is by no means helped by Wilfrid Lawson's heavy and Macdona-esque interpretation of the part. But this is a minor criticism, for the film is otherwise brilliantly cast, and even the smallest parts are played by stars of the London stage with that polish and assurance which one usually misses in British films. The main honours must, of course, go to Leslie Howard as Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza ; the former finely avoids losing our sympathy in his harsher moods and puts a most dynamic energy into everything he says and does ; the latter, though a little uneasy in the difficult opening scenes, gives one of the best screen performances of the year.
But, as already indicated, the laurel crown goes to Asquith.
He brings to the film that warm sense of the humanities, and that feeling for composition which never descends to the artistic, which still make his early silent films like Underground a vivid and abiding memory. To this he adds an almost incredible ingenuity of movement and editing which turns what might so easily have been a photographed stage play into something essentially filmic. The long Shavian quarrel between Higgins and Eliza after the final success of the experiment is almost more exciting in its visuals than in its talk ; moreover it has a naturalism which could only come from a deeply sympathetic observation of human kind. A Shaw play may not be an ideal scenario, but Asquith, aided and abetted by Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller, has made it so.
The Lady Vanishes is a Hitchcock film of the first water.
It is based on The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, which is recognised by connoisseurs as one of the most tantalising and exciting of mystery stories ; to its central theme—that of a quiet English spinster who vanishes from a crowded continental express and whose existence is then denied by everyone on the train save the heroine—Hitchcock has added some typical embroidery of his own making and a great deal of quiet but jolly humour. The two highly conventional Englishmen, anguished lest they should arrive home too late for the Test Match, are played with just the right under-emphasis by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, and Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave show an equally pleasant wit as the hero and heroine. A large cast includes especially Dame May Whiny as the vanishing spinster, Paul Lukas as the villain (as suave as every good villain should be) and Cecil Parker as a magnificently studied Laodicean.
But the value of the film lies not so much in the good casting as in the brilliant scripting—for which Hitchcock and Alma Revile are no doubt jointly responsible. " Continuity " has become a cant term of late, and it is only in a case like this that one realises what a vital factor it is—more vital to a story than all the montage in the world. As usual with Hitchcock, the film is rather like a string of beads—each bead representing an excitingly built-up and self-contained sequence. But, as with all necklaces, the string is all important, for without it the symmetrical arrangement of the beads collapses altogether. Compared even with most American thrillers, The Lady Vanishes is a model of its kind—if not a text-book.
BASIL WRIGHT.
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