• The Cinema
"Emil and the Detectives." A U.F.A. Film At the Cinema House Theatre, Oxford Street.
Elam is a good deal younger than the heroes of most sensa- tional films, being only about twelve by the look of him. He sets off from his home in the country with his mother's blessing, 140 marks, and a bunch of flowers for his grandmother in Berlin. He shares a compartment in the train with the Man in the Bowler Hat, whose indescribably sinister appearance is too much even for Emil's remarkable self-possession. From this miscreant he accepts a drugged sweet, and recovers con- sciousness to find his money gone. But the thief is still in sight, and Emil tracks him through Berlin to his hotel. A gang of ragamuffins, whose organization and audacity would do credit to Chicago, come to his assistance. The hotel is surrounded, the thief's room is ransacked, but without success, for the notes arz in the crown of that bowler hat.
In the end, however, the thief panics : Emil identifies the notes when he attempts to change them ; and it is not long before the small detectives are receiving a civic welcome from Emil's home-town, for there was a 1,000-marks reward, as well as a bowler hat, on that head. The children have bagged a master-criminal.
Childhood is a medium in which neither the stage nor the screen has shown any great aptitude for working with success ; innocence and precocity are habitually exploited till we blush. But this German film goes about its business straight- forwardly and without self-consciousness, betraying only here and there a hint of patronage, and never a tendency to senti- mentalize. The result is a drama not altogether real (everyone under the age of twelve is a thought too self-reliant and sagacious), but throughout extremely amusing and extremely exciting ; and the atmosphere of the picture has a curious and undeniable charm, of the sort (I hasten to add) which we associate rather with Clair than with Coogan.
APEMANTUS.
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