Acting Diminuendo
THEY WON'T FORGET. (National Film Theatre.) —HELL ON FRISCO BAY. (Warner.)—ON THE THRESHOLD OF SPACE. (Rialto.) To compare the acting in They Won't Forget, now showing as part of the 'Tribute to the Warner Brothers' season at the National Film Theatre, with that of Hell on Frisco Bay is a lesson in changes of acting technique in the cinema. Not that, as films, the two are really comparable. They Won't Forget is serious, impressive, and memorable; Hell on Frisco Bay tough routine stuff you'll forget in a week. They Won't Forget was made by Mervyn LeRoy in 1937, with a diminutive Lana Turner as the schoolgirl whose murder sets off 8 lynch mob in a small southern town; Hell on Frisco Bay is as up to date as Warn r• color and CinemaScope can make it. It is a matter of comparing a very god old film with a mediocre brand-new one, but when it comes to acting, the odds I re about even. Both films have splendidly II" blooded performances from experienced filN villains—in the first, a rather macabrely Young and jaunty Claude Rains, in the second 30 ageing but still viciously magnetic Edward G. Robinson, looking more than ever like 3 cartoonist's view of Lord Beaverbrook, both of whom give bigger-than-life-size 11' t. formances of almost heroic unpleasantne But among the minor characters comes the difference. In the twenty-year-old film every actor seems to be trying to grow bigger than life-size: the heroics, the large gestures, the whole theatricalness still of acting—these arc what strike one. While the direction of The? Won't Forget makes it brilliant melodrama, the acting can only be described as brilliant halm Today the brash boy seems impossibly shrill' the frightened Negro too painfully hysterical the vengeful brother too deeply South to b anything but nearly funny. Not , only the fashions but the whole technique of film actin seems to have changed: we have grown used' since then, to a gradual diminution of grandilo- quence, to something quieter, subtler, Mnre individual. Alan Ladd in Hell on Frisco B')' is the near-comic farthest point to which the. modern throw-away style can get. Pale, Or- s sive, stiff-jointed and antipathetic, be marches on to his vengeance, not with the smouldering gaze and twitching forelock of a genera-- n back, but with a uniform grey glint in his c to match an impeccable grey mackintosh• k glacial righteousness of his progress Ma Edward G. Robinson's explosive waterfront
c
n tycoon seem almost cosy by comparison• s, beautiful performance bridges the generation but in a mood of the most contemporary restraint—that of Fay Wray playing, more cc less, herself, that is, an ex-film actress, 011,11h famous, now retired, still beautiful, still with nn, that indefinable quality that, in any generato is needed to make that curious form of Pc a star. Director: Frank Tuttle.
An actor who, not so long ago, was PlaYoil; hairy he-men appears as an almost unreel/ nisable but pleasant surprise in 00 Threshold of Space. In rimless spectaclesi; disguising as those worn by the hal heroine of East Lynne, John Hodiak turns ."t as a stoutish, middle-aged, flat-voiced, attractive major in a performance of cliusi chilling authenticity. This isn't, as You in hi think, a film about Martians and monsters, r a sober and often thrilling record of ex,Poit. ments in high-altitude flying at present °,,, carried out by the American Air Force. Madison is the medico-parachutist Wit Madison spacial nerves. Director: Rober Webb.
g is it tt g y II ISABEL Olot
Y
Previous page
