THE CINEMA
Now that the great Russians have shot their bolt and belong to history—the age of early Close-Ups and the old Windmill' Theatre, of earnest lectures (which have come to so little) in teashops on how to use sound " constructively "—one would name, I think, Julien" Duvivier and Fritz Lang as the two greatest fiction directors still at work. Duvivier has gone to Hollywood, where 'Lang has been now for some years— I hope Hollywood doesn't treat Duvivier as it has treated Lang.
For it is impossible not to believe that Lang—surrounded by the Virginia van Upps and the Paul Weatherwax's, by the odd names of Hollywood credit titles—has been sabdtaged. Given proper control over story and scenario, Lang couldn't have made so bad a film as You and Me .7. the whole picture is like an elegant and expensive gesture of despair. The advertised subject is " 5o,000 Girls Forbidden by Law to Marry," which merely refers to the reasonable regulation that convicts mustn't marry while they are still on parole. This surely is to go through the code-book with a fine-toothed comb in search of an injustice, a hard case, a little social significance. In fact, the inability of Sylvia Sidney to marry George Raft (I don't remember what they are called in the picture : it doesn't matter : they are only a couple of capable actors registering the regulation heartbreak) isn't an important part of the story at all. The real plot is concerned with an incredible philanthropist who makes a point of employ- ing paroled convicts in his mammoth store as shop assistants. Raft, who has worked off his parole, marries Sylvia Sidney, who hasn't finished hers—he tells her his past, but she's afraid to tell him hers. He learns the truth, takes a high' moral line about deception, and joins with the other convicts in robbing the store. They are caught by the obstinate philanthropist and a couple of private guards, and 'as the price of their forgiveness have to sit through a talk by Miss Sidney, who demonstrates on a blackboard that crime doesn't pay. She then disappears into the night without telling Raft that she's going to have a baby, and has it—apparently next day. Physiological tact could hardly be carried further.
Everyone has heard of the Hollywood " doghouse "—the practice of ruining a star by providing bad parts. No star has been treated worse than Lang is here by his scenario- writers. The continuity is quickie in its naivety. " How do we get to the information bureau ? " Miss Sidney asks. " By subway," Raft says, and there, of course, they arein the subway. A few experiments are made with verse and chanted speech (how unhappy- Roscoe Karns looks about. it all), but they are only the desperate contortions of a director caught in the Laocoon coils of an impossible script.
L'Homme du Jour—a charming comedy, with Maurice Chevalier, about an electrician who becomes famous for a day after he has given blood to save the life of a tragic actress, who is taken heavily up by the great interpreter of Racine and then, when he sleeps through a bedroom date, heavily dropped again—may not be vintage Duvivier, but it is admirable vin ordinaire. It is the kind of story Clair might have directed in the old days ; the Pressmen cynical over the champagne, the enthusiastic straphangers in the Metro, are Clair characters, inhabitants of a whimsical fairyland where providence strikes blindly and luck never lasts long, and the lottery ticket gets lost among the top-hats, yet no one really, cares. But Duvivier's pictures have a stronger sense of human life—even in a comedy the shadow is there, and some- where in the shadow the abortionist throws a fit at Marseilles and Pepe cuts his throat with an inadequate knife. Strangers in the Metro may be carried away by a wave of altruistic senti- ment, but in the electrician's boarding-house—among his friends—there is only jealousy, the mean middle-aged passion to take him down .a peg. And so we get, in this airy ridiculous comedy, one of Duvivier's saddest episodes—bogus letters that arrange an assignation between the electrician and a flower-girl who secretly and.hopelessly loves him, while the hideous inhabi- tants of the boarding-house sit in the evening light sniggering
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