At the Movies
Chestnuts in Her Lap. By C. A. Lejeune. (Phoenix House. 10s. 6d.)
MISS LEJEUNE'S film reviews have always added an extra holiness to Sundays, but having recently sampled the life of a film critic myself I am filled with renewed reverence for her work. Even the fact of physically sitting in cinemas for so many hours has, I find, a slightly numbing effect, but Miss Lejeune, who has sat in a close, smoky twilight for a large part of twenty years, still retains all the sparkle of a May morning.
Chestnuts in Her Lap is a selection front her reviews that have appeared in The Observer since 1936, reviews that have ever pierced the lethargy of Sunday morning with shafts of brilliance, and per- meated its dankness with what her son in his able foreword calls " a genial enthusiasm that never fails." It is obvious, as he points out, that "for some reason Miss Lejeune likes the cinema," and it seems that no power on earth can disillusion her as to its joys, neither can custom stale her judgement. She brings a fresh eye and an immaculate ear to each film, and then uncovers for us in the liveliest terms imaginable the very heart and soul of the matter. She does not spare the rod nor indeed disdain at times to use the dagger, and when she damns she damns thoroughly ; and yet I feel her victims must nevertheless be encouraged rather than cowed by her punishment, for she is so patently out to construct, she is so honestly interested in their work, so eager to praise whenever it is possible, and so thoroughly human. And funny, oh dear how funny she is! Incurably lighthearted, her witticisms bubble mercurially to the top of even her most serious arbitrations, and in the midst of solemnity we are suddenly pricked with delight at the turn of a phrase, at the shrewdness of her humour. Patient with every sincere effort however misguided, she is merciless to cant, whimsy and bathos, and she has the quickest eye in the world to mark an incongruity. "Although," she says in her review of The Song of Bernadette, "the language of faith is universal . . . I can't feel that it is really helpful for one French peasant to address another French peasant in phrases such as Boimadette, yoo-hoo! ' " And again, in her review of The Constant Nymph, she cannot resist pointing out that " it is not usual for a notoriously slap-dash .composer, in his cups, to dash off a copper- plate score in the last five minutes before dying. Nor is it a general concert practice to put the soloist and chorus, in white nighties, immediately behind the percussion department."
Oh, Miss Lejeune, may you, like your Miss Rogers who " wears severe suits but she wears an awful lot of them," continue to dress our Sundays as you choose, and for an awful long time!
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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