THE CINEMA
"The Luck of the Irish." At. the New Gallery--" The Sequel to Second Bureau." At the Curzon-" Thunder in the City." At the London Pavilion-" Head Over Heels." At the Gaumont
WEIGHING machines which can be made to record any weight at the touch of a finger ; chickens filled with lead sausages which fall quietly into a drawer of sawdust after the chickeh has been weighed : the racket which cheats housewives of a few cents every time they make a purchase is the subject of Mr. James Cagney's new film. The Sequel to Second Bureau deals with the theft of a new French cartridge by German
agents and the successful attempt of two French spies, posing as an art-critic and his sister, to recover the cartridge before it has been analysed by the head of the German Secret 'Service. The issue, compared with that of the American picture, scents oddly theoretical. The imagination, however Francophil, refw es to be really stirred. "You carry the best wishes cif four million Frenchmen," an officer remarks loudly outside the Paris-Berlin wagon lit (after reading Mr. Compton Mad- kenzie's reminiscences we can swallow any amount of military indiscretions), but the imagination refuses to forget entirely the bad wishes of the four million Germans. The cartridge is treated with immense pomposity by the heads of the rival Secret Services, but one knows quite well that very soon someone else will invent a better one. It is all an amusing game to keep the Army Estimates up. It hasn't the immediate import- ance of the weighing - machines in the grocery stores. Blit as a military variation on the Tale of the Three Bears—" Who's been eating up my porridge ? "—this French melodrama has charm. The story is told with a great deal of malicious humour, especially in the Haus Vaterland scenes—the bogus Tyrolean singers, the huge tankards, the absurd painted mountains under an artificial storm, the Horst Wessel song booming from the loudspeaker, the outstretched arms and the heartfelt Heils.
Mr. Cagney as the Deputy Chief of the Weights and Measures Department of a big American city : one knows what to expect and Mr. Cagney seldom disappoints : the lightweight hands held a little away from the body ready for someone else's punch : the quick nervous steps of a man whose footwork is good : the extreme virtuosity of the muted sentiment. In his latest picture it is all there, with perhaps a more sophisticated humour than usual : the scenes with the ward politicians, the mayor, the philanthropist, crooks all, are pleasantly phosphorescent with corruption, and so is the admirable climax at an evening party (given by a retiring boxer) where all is tuxedos and gentility, but a little uppercut in a corner passes unnoticed among pals.
Thunder in the City, with the American star Mr. Edward G. Robinson, and Head Over Heels, with Miss Jessie Matthews,
compete for the position of worst English film of the quarter. I think the former has it, with its tricky self-conscious con- tinuity, its horde of Hollywood stars on holiday, Mr. Ned Mann's worst "special effect" to date, and its complete ignorance—in spite of its national studio—of English life and behaviour. It is a fantasy (an American publicity man dis- missed from his New York firm because they want English dignity comes over to England and puts over a big business flotation by what are supposed to be American methods), a fantasy by an elephantine disciple of M. Clair (astonishingly his name is Robert E. Sherwood) but even a fantasy needs some relation to life. Perhaps the only really English thing about the picture is its humour : an awful vista of old bound
Punch's dwindling down the dark shelves of a country house library.
As for Miss Jessie Matthews, she has been ill served in her latest film, a moribund tale of poor young people with ambitions in Parisian garrets. The dialogue has a moral earnestness for which it would be hard to find a parallel even in the Victorian age. "You do—trust me ? " the hero asks the heroine after she has accepted an invitation to lunch in his garret. Only one song :
"Why must I weep on
The pillow I sleep on ? "
possesses a kind of awful charm. GRAHAM GREENE.
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