Therese Raquin THtRESE R AQ UIN. (Paris-Pullman.) — JACQUELINE. (Odeon, Leicester Square.)
THE southern half of Europe has evolved its own pattern of provincial life—each country varying, but with a terrible rough homogeneity about it that rainy northerners like ourselves find hard to understand. What is most incom- prehensible is the minute degree of change between the sort of life described by, say, Flaubert, and the sort that occasionally exercises M. Simenon in our own day. Scooters and cinemas have arrived, but the petit- bourgeois horrors continue—the same oppres- siveness, the same lurid interior decoration, the same black-clothed, pious, hideous hags, the same desolation, pollarded trees, youths kick- ing stones along the river bank, and a river meandering endlessly somewhere else. It was cunning of Marcel Came to modernise Zola in his film based on Therese Raquin, if only to show the continuity of life in a French provincial draper's (imagine the draper's shop in The Old Wives' Tale put into modern dress: the whole atmospheric point would be lost). The most interesting thing about this disturb- ing film was the way it took us, not merely to the edges of this sort of life, not merely to look through the bars of the cage, but right inside—smelling the soup, crouching behind doors to avoid the old woman, watching the 'narrow street through narrower shutters, exchanging vindictive looks with an evil' cat, feeling the whole imprisonment, the endless, busy, trivial ennui. So deeply were we inside, so claustrophobic was the effect, that I kept finding myself arguing, as if with actual circum- stances, on points of detail. 'Why those terrible net curtains?' I found myself asking crossly. 'Why not a bit of white paint about the place'? Why black stockings on a girl that age?' Could any hell have been envisaged more infernal than the Raquins' Thursday afternoons, with everyone yapping and cheating over the game, the faces sharp with hate and greed over the gain or loss of a hundred francs, the plush, the framed photographs, the ugly clothes, the aspidistras no longer a joke, but malignant!
Carnes direction is unemphatic and even impersonal; the most personal thing about the film, the thing that most nostalgically recalled past films of his, was, to my mind, the music--,, very occasional, very unobtrusive as it was Objects tell his story more than the individual quirks of movement or speed we are apt to look on as direction; his morality is pointed, not so much by the facts (which are cruel and unpleasant : an unfaithful wife and her lover kill the husband, are blackmailed and dis- covered) as by the personalities of the pro- tagonists—for the wife has every excuse for unfaithfulness, the lover every reason for anger, the husband every reason to die, the Mother-in-law every sin to he punished for. It is not just a matter of the lover being a strapping and attractive lorry driver, while the husband is a wretched, snivelling and degenerate little clerk, or of the wife being the lifelong victim of the fiend, her mother-in-law. It is a case of the sinners being, in grain, better than their victims—more human, more com- SPECTATOR, JUNE 15, 195 passionate, cleaner, more worth saving—so their discovery appears the arbitrary 1' fairness of fate. Therese refuses to run a% Y from her husband, fearing the shock will kill him; the answer, with so nauseating a speci" men, seems to be, 'Let it.' He dies, in more
terrible circumstances, bringing more terrible consequences, and the answer seems to
'What a waste.' For once, in a film, conscience seems to be over-tender. Perhaps sympathy for the lovers (played by Raf Vallone, who iS superbly good, and Simone Signoret, who. though acting admirably, is less personal Y sympathetic) and loathing for their technical victims distort the plain facts. If so, what is the moral? This circular question has been revolving in my head ever since, like a mouse on a wheel.
Cyril Cusack is Ireland's gift to the cinema
and he alone redeems Jacqueline from t1 e lower depths of banality. Drunk as a lord on coronation night, dancing a jig in the pouring rain, snubbing a nagging wife for the first time in twenty years—whatever he is up to, his per- fect timing, the elegant grotesqueness of 116 movements, the judge-like solemnity of 115 birdlike features, make him a delight. The rest of the film, a well-meaning British comedy about slum life among the Irish, I found, and I suspect most people seeing it will find, mildlY embarrassing, chiefly on account of a grossly miscast little girl who, through no fault of her own, 1 suppose, is made to play an infant elide somewhat in the style of the regrettable Miss Temple. John Gregson as Dad, Kathie Ryan as Ma, and a rollicking cast as the neighbours, do their best. Director: RoY
Baker.
ISABEL QUKil-
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