The Cinema
"Barbary Coast." At the London Pavilion. "Episode." At the Academy.—" The Passing of the Third Flool Back." At the New Gallery Barbary coast is melodrama of the neatest, most expert kind, well directed, well acted and well Written. The wit, vigour and panache of Mr. Ben Hecht and Mr. MacArthur have raised nearly to international halma form (in Mr. Aldous Huxley's phrase) a conventional film story of a girl who comes to San Francisco one fog-bound night in the '40's to marry a gold prospector and finds that he has been murdered. She stays to become the mistress of his killer, the Big Shot, and falls in love with a young prospector who reads Shelley and wants to write poetry. The Big Shot, himself pursued by Vigilantes, follows his mistress with the intention of killing her lover, but, taking pity on them both, goes to meet his lynchers. The story, it will be seen, belongs to the " far, far better " school, but the character of the, Big Shot has .0 sourness, of the girl an unscrupulousness, which is fresh and interesting. The conventionality of the plot has provided challenge to the director and the authors to make something real out of the hocus-pocus.
They have succeeded triumphantly. There are moments as dramatically exciting as anything I have seen on the fictional screen. Sous Les Toils de Paris contained a sequence in which Prejean was surrounded by a gang with drawn razors in the darkness of a railway viaduct ; the smoke Me; continually across, and the dialogue was drowned in the din of shunting trucks. The steamy obscurity, the whispers, the uproar overhead combined to make the scene vividly sinister, There is a moment in Barbary' Coast that takes' its place with Clair's, when the Big Shot's gunman, on his way to commit another murder in the San Francisco of which he has long been one of the undisputed rulers, feels the pistols of the Vigilantes against his ribs. They walk him out to the edge of the acetylene-lighted town along streets ankle-deep is mud, holding a mock trial with counsel and witnesses as the}' go ; the low voices, the slosh of mud round their boots, the rhythmic stride are terrifying because they have been exactly imagined, with the ear as well as the eye.
The Austrian film Episode has nothing comparable to offer■ nothing even to equal the acting of Mr. Edward G. Robinson and Miss Miriam Hopkins and half a dozen less known player$ in their small vivid parts in Barbary Coast. I cannot under stand the enthusiasm for Fraulein Paula Wessely, star of the slow decorative romantic Maskerade. This stocky, rathet graceless actress may be said, I suppose, to act naturally, rather in the same way that a Roedean girl may be said td' play hockey naturally, but if one wants art to imitate the natural, to be conscious and precise in its effects, one wiU surely prefer Miss Lynn Fontanne or half a dozen other naturalistic actresses to Fraulein Wessely, whose air of healthY prudery I always find peculiarly odious. The background to, this rather silly comedy about a rich old philanderer, his .sons tutor and an art student who wishes to keep from her widowed mother the fact that they have been ruined is supposed to 1)0 the Vienna of 19'22, the Vienna of the inflation : but so tragic a breakdown of the framework of life deserves, a less per funetory, a less humorous and sentimental treatment.
To my surprise I enjoyed The Passing of the. Third Floor Back. The pious note has been toned down, the milk of human kindness in the original play has been agreeably watered, and the types in the small London "private hotel are observed with malicious realism. Unfortunately, sweet' ness and light do break in, and the director cannot convey these qualities with the same truth as the cans of cooling water, the interminable uncarpeted stairs, the jangle of beg and nerves. The excursion steamer, on which the Stranger takes everyone for is trip to Margate, is as chromium-plated as a millionaire's yacht and carries a chorus of Goldwyn girls in bathing costumes. This is to be a little too .cynical. The right sense of sudden and happy release can surely sometimes be ,caught among the winkles and blare and sweat of August holiday.
GRAHAM GREENS.
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