THE CINEMA
"The Light that Failed." At the Plaza.—" The Old Maid." At Warner's.
THESE two pictures succeed admirably in what they attempt— to jerk the waiting tear out of its duct. Human nature is
seldom more incomprehensible than in its sympathies ; art which is supposed to enlarge them has left us, after all these centuries, reading with casual interest of the casualties in a wrecked train, or passing over a street accident altogether (" no news today "), though both are within range of our experience. But tell a story about a great artist who receives
a spear slash in the Sudan, and a long time later goes blind just after painting the picture of his career—a picture which he doesn't know has been spoiled with turpentine by his angry model, and who later, when he does learn the truth, goes out, blind as he is, to the Sudan, hits on his old news- paper friends and an English square at the moment of attack, and dies happily and quickly with a bullet in the right place —tell a somewhat unusual anecdote of that kind, an anecdote which can hardly appeal to the personal experience of anyone in the audience, and you will have every tenth man and woman weeping in the dark. Take, too, the subject of The Old Maid—churned out, it may be noted, by the late Edith Wharton at a time when she must have forgotten the lesson of the Master : you wouldn't say that story either was likely to happen twice on the same planet. A younger sister (Bette Davis) loves the man her sister (Miriam Hopkins) has jilted: he goes off to the Civil War and is killed, leaving her pregnant : so in order to hide her child she opens a home for war orphans. But she becomes engaged to his sister's brother-in-law (the whole story reads like the table of for- bidden degrees), and her sister learns of the child: she stops the marriage on the wedding day, pretending that sister Davis has consumption. Then her own husband dies, and for rather inadequate reasons sister Davis comes to share her home, and it isn't long before her child is calling sister Hopkins Mummie and sister Davis Auntie. Then we skip the years and find sister Davis a typical old maid, disliked by her child, who finds her harsh and unsympathetic (this is to hide the awful truth from her), and it all ends with the daughter's marriage and a farewell kiss to poor auntie at the instigation of kind mummie. This story will undoubtedly prove a winner : in a world of bombed towns tears fall with delirious ease over this rather improbable life of an old maid.
Kipling's novel has been reproduced with great fidelity, and the period is admirably caught, with Norfolk jackets and Sargent hats and gentlemen's rooms : even the pictures painted by Helder are period—big action canvases in the style of the Illustrated London News, and we can well imagine the master- piece, Melancholia, as the Academy picture of the year. This is intelligent—it is easier to sympathise with a popular artist we can believe in than in a great unlikely genius. Ronald Colman's Helder is agreeable, but his voice has a way of breaking into insincerity, of giving up the ghost of acting
altogether (perhaps the Kipling dialogue is too much for him, admirable coloured stuff though it is), and he is sometimes acted right off the set by Walter Huston as his friend Torpenhow and by Ida Lupino, with her lovely barmaid features, as the vicious little cockney model. Newspapermen will feel envious at this picture of correspondents who really went to Khartoum with Kitchener, or to Kandahar with Roberts, instead of watching endless football matches and E.N.S.A. entertainments behind the lines.
Great actresses choose odd mediums, and perhaps Miss Davis is a great actress—she seemed so in her early pop-eyed appearances, all nerves and nastiness (you remember Oi Human Bondage). Her performance in The Old Maid is of extraordinary virtuosity—as the young girl, and the secret
mother, and the harsh prim middle-aged woman with her tiny lines and her talcum. It is like a manual of acting for beginners in three lessons, but beside Miss Lupino's vivid outbreak it has the dryness of a. textbook. The whole picture is very lavish and competent, with a New World moral outlook which is summed wonderfully up in a phrase addressed by
sister Hopkins to sister Davis : "If Tina is to be made happy her position must be. made unassailable, financially and
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