The Cinema
A LAUGHING tiger puts fear into the hearts of the Malayan natives; but we, of course, who have borne the white man's burden of sunny Southsea and the picture page, as soon as we hear that silvery and self-conscious tinkle, recognise its source. This particular holiday girl is the daughter of a dead American, and has been brought up by an old Malayan until a stampede of elephants wrecks the village and a tiger kills her foster father. Aged about six, and accompanied by a tiger rub, she goes alone into the jungle ; and from that time on she is seen by no human being until an American expedition arrives in the island : a retired colonel and his daughter, her fiancé (a travel-writer), and poor Mr. Lyn Overninhm, who is expected to lend humorous relief to a film already richly comic. The colonel and his daughter go to Shanghai for the rains, but the other two stay to investigate the native superstitions.
Needless to say, the hero is attacked in the jungle by the pet tiger, now as mature as his mistress, and Len►o (its name is Lemo) is called off only just in time. The girl assists the wounded travel-writer to her lair (a scurry in the tree tops overhead, and we recognise the simian features of one of Hollywood's most famous comedians), and the rains oppor- tunely catch him there with Bogo, the baboon, and Lemo and the girl. Mysterious white women whom explorers discover in the world's jungles always have an embarrassing directness towards the male. The horror of triumphant possessiveness, the snaking of well-covered limbs along the floor, the animal flash of strong female teeth in a confined space, is vividly conveyed : " Whoa you hold we tight in a jungle night, My sweet,"
as an old Malayan ballad, translated by our hero, puts it. But the possessiveness is not immediately triumphant : he
remembers his betrothed in Shanghai firmly all through the rainy season, and at its close we sec him still manfully resisting the temptation to kiss his companion. Her directness while sun-bathing scares him, and lie departs (" You won't mind really. You have Bogo and Lemo ") to rejoin his companions who have given him up as dead. " It's time fur you to shave, dear, and change for dinner," his fiancee remarks (she has returned with the colonel front Shanghai) to her lover resur- rected a bare half-hour. Tire girl has followed him, and the colonel's daughter cannot, petty-minded creature, believe in a chastity maintained all through the rainy season in a cave. She plans to make her rival ridiculous and we have one of those scenes, so common in pictures from the great democracy, of exaggerated social consciousness. Will this jungle-bred girl use a spoon with her grape-fruit ? Heavens, she has taken a fork : her rival will conquer. But no ! Mr. Lyn Overman,' in the nick of time has conveyed with a wink and a whisper the correct information ; the hero hasn't noticed.
The climax is magnificent. The natives, who think the girl is a witch, trap the party, tic them to trees and begin to bury the girl alive. Who is to save her ? Lemo, you think, but you arc wrong. He charges and they kill him. The overseer frees himself -but he, too, dies heroically (the girl by this time is buried up to the neck). The hero gets free — but what is one travel-writer among a horde of natives without a rook-rifle ? No, it is Bogo who saves them all, who spies their plight from the tree tops and sununons every baboon in the jungle to a magnificent charge.
The censors have given this lively picture an " A " certificate in spite of the hero's heroic chastity. To those under sixteen debarred from these adult delights by Lord Tyrrell, I recommend Windbag the Sailor, a farce with Mr. Will Hay admirably directed by Mr. William Beaudine. Mr. Hay, since his Narkover days, has progressively improved, and he has never had a better part than that of Captain Ben Cutlett, the skipper of a canal barge given to boasting of experiences on the seas he has never sailed, who finds himself in. command of a cargo steamer, with a villainous crew under secret orders to scuttle the ship. GRAHAM GREENE.
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