Cinema
THE UNDERDOG. (Bettieley.)—RIFIEL (CUE- zon.)—THE PRINCE OF PLAYERS. (Rialto.) THE hero of The Underdog is a timid German boy at the turn of the century who through fear learns so to love authority that under the tutelage of the Prussian Army he himself grows up to be a bully. An indictment of German militarism, this film, based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, is a curious and compelling work. Wolfgang Standte turns back the hands of his directional clock so far that one has a feeling one is seeing a revival of some classic of the Twenties. Fragmentary, fidgety episodes bulging with detail and trickily photographed —backs of heads, waistcoats, disembodied mouths and mirror shots are especially preva- lent—have a strong period-piece flavour to them, but they arc strangely effective, the miasma of Kaiser-worship, brutality and hysteria fitting snugly over the cluttered sets. Obviously a fanatic against rearmament, Herr Standte has possibly overplayed his hand, his scarred custodians of German honour being one and all vile. It seems it was de rigueur for officers to seduce young girls and then refuse to marry them because they were not virgins, and not content with exacerbating the military he reveals the ruthless corruption of bureau- crats, so that only very few characters (the poor, of course) are pleasant, or indeed toler- able. Headed by Werner Peters, the cast gives a good account of itself within the monocled confines of the script, and it is an interesting though depressing experience to share in full with it that false sense of patriotism which has led us so often to destruction.
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Awarded the 1955 Cannes prize for best direction, Rififi is a French gangster picture starring Jean Servais and dealing in the main with, a burglary at the Parish branch of Mappin & Webb. This robbery sequence is undoubtedly one of Jules Dassin's most brilliant achieve- ments, a half-hour of agonising suspense in which the burglars, without speaking a word, perform with all the delicacy and clinical effi- ciency of surgeons a major operation on the jeweller's premises. Every man, a professional at his job, knows his place, handles his tools with beautiful precision, and the silence, broken only by the little clicks and whirrs of steel on steel, deepened by the exchange of glances and awful concentration of the workers on their work, builds up so potent an atmosphere of excitement that it becomes diffi- cult to breathe. After this period of asphyxia- tion everything is bound to be an anti-climax, and the film falls back into more usual chan- nels, gang warfare, with its killings and kid- nappings, coming as a quiet relief. The bur- glars, though meeting the fate they deserve, are, for some reason which all should deplore, delightful fellows; M. Servais attractively lugubrious, the director, as an Italian special- ist in safe-breaking, a dear little dandy of a man, Robert Manual gay and affectionate, Carl Mohner a good father and husband. There seems to be no real wickedness in them at all and one feels that both Mr. Mappin and Mr. Webb are somehow to blame for everything. This perhaps is a weakness, but in a film which depends so much on exploring and applauding. the superb artistry of the burglar it 15 neces- sary to be on the side of evil for a time.
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In The Prince of Players the smouldering Richard Burton takes the part of Edwin Booth, ' America's greatest actor, whose father, Junius Booth, admirably played by Raymond Massey, drank like a fish and had fits of madness, and whose brother, John Wilkes Booth, John Derek, shot Abraham Lincoln. The dark streaks ran too in Edwin, and in this film, written by Moss Hart with the collaboration of Shakespeare, we see him fighting the demons with the help of .his wife, Maggie McNamara.. Like a cottage quilt.' the picture hops from the purple patches, the great speeches flung with splendid voice by Mr. Burton, to the jaundiced and frayed; but on the whole it is a finely designed, colourful affair, well tailored by Philip Dunne and finished off with a beautiful dramatic flourish.
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