CINEMA
"Sunset Boulevard." (Carlton.)--44 Cargo to Capetown." (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion.)—" Rogues of Sherwood Forest." (Caumont and Marble Arch Pavilion.) Sunset Boulevard is a brilliant film directed by Mr. Billy Wilder, of Lost Weekend fame, and brilliantly acted by Miss Gloria Swanson, Mr. Erich von Stroheim and Mr. William Holden. Miss Swanson, returning to the screen after nineteen years' absence, plays the part of an ageing ex-star who lives in a gigantic derelict house, adopts a gutless young script-writer in order that he shall patch together a horrible scenario she has written, and ends by shooting him and going mad. Miss Swanson is so truly magnificent in her pitiful delusions, so incomparably better an actress than anybody on the screen today, that one cannot begin to imagine why she has spent nearly two decades in retirement. From choice, one hopes, yet does not altogether believe. Mr. von Stroheim, as the ex-director turned butler, and Mr. Holden as a " kept " man are both credible and pathetic, and as himself Mr. Cecil B. de Mille, sadly compassionate towards a relict of a byegone age, is admirable
Sunset Boulevard is bursting with detail, and as well as giving us a memorable opportunity of seeing the—to a whole generation— mythical Miss Swanson's emotional fireworks,"it is a witty and cruel commentary on Hollywood, a tragedy and a trip into nostalgia. The direction is superb.
Cargo to Capetown is a good film of the sweat and dirty dungaree tYPe. Mr. John Ireland, his strange tip-tilted face furrowed with care, is the captain of a wheezy old oil-tanker, and in order to
persuade anyone to sail her, he shanghais a crew, an old shipmate, Mr. Broderick Crawford, and Mr. Crawford's fiancée, Miss Ellen Drew. Love, though always round the corner, is not nearly so much in evidence as one might expect, being kept in a state of subjugation, as it were, by other elemental things, a hurricane and a fire. Whether in a sou'wester, an asbestos suit or a tired uniform, Mr. Ireland has a magnetic quality which cannot be denied, and one finds oneself thinking up ways and means of getting the man to smile. One can see how easy it would be for Miss Drew to make it her life-work. The noise is, at most times, terrific, and the story constantly abandoned for nautical sequences, for Mr. Craw- ford mending an alarming looking piston under water. Master Espinoza getting half-washed overboard, a nameless member of the crew drowning in oil, and other such misfortunes. But, on the whole, the film is convincing and makes good entertainment.
This cannot truthfully be said of Rogues of Sherwood Forest, which concerns Robin Hood's son, King John and his merry Magna ...Carta, a lot of Barons in tin pork-pie hats and a lot of Bowmen in fore-and-afts. The overall impression is that the boy scouts are competing before a dramatic congress with one of their own
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