CINEMA
The Purple Plain. (Leicester Square.)— Ripening Seed. (Rialto.)—Suddenly. (London Pavilion.) H. E. BATES'S novel, The Purple Plain, has been adapted for the screen by Eric Ambler, the film being directed by Robert Parrish with merciless realism and sporadic bril- liance. Though it is not a war film the accepted sense, it lingers lengthily on haman suffering, an appalling • journey through Burmese jungle country taken by Grgiory Peck, Maurice Denham and Lyndon Brook, survivors of a crashed RAF plane, being followed step by tortured step in a series of hair-raising close-ups. The looming faces, upon which every drop of sweat, every bleeding scratch, every bristle and blemish is magnified, certainly draw one, shocked and unwilling, into the circle of agony, the sledge-hammer of pain and the throb of heat pounding out in waves from their tormented flesh. This absorption of Mr. Parrish with detail is extremely effective, even if there are moments when one feels that his concentration on suffering merits an H certificate. Mr. Peck plays the part of an airman who has lost his wife in a London air raid and seeks death in the war but only succeeds in getting medals; an embittered bottled-up man, half round the bend, who only finds a new urge to live when he meets a Burmese girl, played with but moderate success by Win Min Than. Mr. Peck is admirably efficient as he always is;-and in one scene, when he speaks of his wife's death, most moving, which he isn't always. Good too is Mr. Denham as the irritating Army pen-pusher who goes mad in the sun and shoots himself. So is Brenda de Banzie as a Scottish missionary, a sensible freckled singer of hymns. And so is Mr. Brook, whose smothered whimpers from a jungle- built stretcher are almost unbearable. Indeed this film, in its active parts at any rate, is a line piece of work, squeezing one's attention into a state of breathlessness bordering on asphyxia and fascinating one with its sweltering, fly-ridden, blistering adventures.
Colette's Le Bid en Herbe, her penetrating study of adolescence, has been directed as a film by Claude Autant-Lara with all that delicacy which only the French seem able to bring to provocative subjects. For it is the story of a boy and a girl, aged sixteen and fifteen, Pierre-Michel Beck and Nicole Berger, who have been brought up together as children and whose awakened feelings, with all their lapses back into the childish, are not fully recognized until the boy has had an affair with a middle-aged woman, Edwige Feuillere. M. Autant-Lara points out that whereas it is permissible for old men to fall in love with young girls, the opposite is considered lamentably shocking, and he sets out to prove, under Colette's guidance, that a boy can greatly benefit from the experience of an older woman. If she is gracious and gentle she can teach him much, and her youthful rival, roused to jealousy, can also be brought to a quicker realisation of love. This sweet-sad tale of a summer by the sea is told in the simplest terms but is
acted with exquisite subtlety. Edwige Feuillere, treading the thin ice with perfect good taste, is a compact of nuances, her voice alone a miracle of shades evoking mistress, mother and tender cynic. The boy, so awkward and sullen in his fear of an overpowering sensation, is extremely touch- ing, and with little homely seaside scenes interspersed, the girls' school bathing, the cry of the gulls, the innocent parents playing Mah Jong, this film is as charming as it is unsalacious. Needless to say it is considered corrupting for those under sixteen.
• • • In Suddenly an unmelodious Frank Sinatra holds up a house and its inmates, props a rifle on a table by the window and proposes assassinating the US President as he disembarks from a train. Although the script is pretty dog-eared there are moments of tenseness, toughness and drama which are rewarding, and as a thriller it has a certain novelty about it which commands respect. Supporting, or rather opposing Killer Sinatra are Sterling Haydn, James Gleason and Nancy Gates, and the film is directed ably by Lewis Allen.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM
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