THE CINEMA
"LES MISERABLES"
The Soul of Humanity, first portion of a new double-length French film based on Victor Hugo's Les Miserables is to be seen this week and for a while to come at the Rialto, Coventry Street, W. 1.
If there are others like myself who attempted but failed to read all the many volumes of the novel, they will be glad to see it potted on the screen—for potted it had to be. But it is a true, if condensed, version of that Gargantuan prose work. The Slip really does convey the spirit of Les Miserables, that monument to good deeds in a naughty world. It makes one shrink with the humiliated, starve with the hungry, and even recognize in the inhuman spy, Javert, a streak of magnificence—the probity of a sincere villain.
Perhaps a thought too little emphasis is given to Valjean's theft of the loaf, which seems to me the most dramatically powerful incident in the long story, next to the gentle Bishop's gift of candlesticks. Has memory embroidered the beauty of the loaf scene as it was in the original Les Miserables film, a dozen 'years ago ? Other things, too, seem by contrast less good 'the new Valjean less tremendous than the early one. But it may be we are accustomed to use leis imagination now than in those early days.
The Soul of Humanity has peculiarities common to most films made by the French, who have learnt little and forgotten nothing in technique. It is diffuse and choppy, too much of an illustration, too little a motion-picture. The actors are too stagy. Above all their wigs and whiskers are too obviously false. But the film has its own strange power, and it is mercifully large in conception and dignified in
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