The Cinema
"A Woman in Her Thirties." At the Capitol HERE is one of those unusual American films which 6:.sca- sionally slip quietly into a West-End programme and are more worth seeing than many spectacular productions, lavishly advertised. It is about a young widow who runs a fur shop in a not very fashionable part of San Francisco. She befriends a young sailor, who is out of work and hungry, and eventually marries him. The mainspring of the story is the restlessness of the sailor in his new home—his hankering after the sea and his affairs with other, younger women. For a short time his interest is held by the birth of a baby ; but the baby dies, and fresh trouble starts when a pretty niece comes to work in the shop.
There are two chief reasons for the film's success—its quietly realistic domestic atmosphere and the acting of Aline MacMahon as the widow. Miss MacMahon has had a sound stage training, and she makes the widow a very real character, showing her as a woman who has acquired from experience a fund of tolerant irony and in whom commercial acumen is blended nevertheless with a certain softness of heart. There is plenty of satirical humour, too, in her treatment of customers, and the relation of the shop dealings, governed by the everlasting tinkling of the door-bell, to the personal drama behind the scenes, is cleverly used to draw the spectator into intimate familiarity with this particular household.
The plot has rather too many strands for a shortish film, and it is perhaps the need for compression which often makes the direction—by Alfred Green—seem rather jerky and disjointed. But his direction has also a downright quality, free from all irrelevant display, which suits the tone of the story and keeps it moving through a succession of small events with an effect of steady purpose. The film's most serious weakness is that some of the episodes are a little forced, and the motives attributed to the characters are not always quite sufficient to account for their actions. But it is pleasant to find an American picture dealing with people who are neither very rich nor very poor, very heroic nor very villainous ; and its note of sober realism is refreshing after Hollywood's usual habit of lurid exaggeration.
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