"We Who Are About To Die" and "College Holiday." At
the Plaza
The Cinema
IF anybody in the year 2000 thinks it worth his while to unearth from our buried civilisation the Babylonian records of the movie industry, he will probably discover the gangster film with a more genuine shock of delight than we not so long ago discovered the disreputable plays of Marlowe. I suppose there are all sorts of excuses to offer why it becomes increas- ingly harder to judge the movies, why the old schoolmaster's comfortable contempt advances instead of retards before a `Hollywood that now terrifies with truth rather than with goblins. Professor Nicoll has made the timely comparison with Elizabethan drama, which in its day was culturally as low and negligible, certainly, as our devotion to Jimmy Cagney and the G-Men. Still, the Headmasters' Conference would probably' be deprived of an agenda if the movies were acluiowledged to be socially meatier than cheiving-giim. And yet anybody who must go to the movies, such as filth critics, occasionally owes the duty to his fellow-men of crying " Eureka ! " rather louder than any individual " find " will warrant. Because for 'two or three years now, while its 'respectable grown-up brother, the theatre, has been spending most eveningS pondering the spiritual dilemmas of almost any family that runs to chintz and £1,000 a year, the poor despised youngster spends his time grubbing for social lessons, natural impulses, humour, and fun in the soil of gangsterdom.
When David Lamson was freed last year, after a harrowing eighteen months' Confinement, from the charge of murdering his wife in Palo Alto, he moved down the coast a few hundred miles and gave to hungry script-writers his first-hand ex- .perience of a State prison. It's not so first-hand as to be unrecognisable at that, there's no privation or secret torture we hadn't seen before, no nuance of suffering that John Beal couldn't have thought up ,out of his training on Broadway or his own honest, charming talent. But even if it's no more than Lanison's hackneyed ordeal, it's also no less, and for most of us newspaper readers and theatregoers a conviction is a headline, a final curtain, and there an end. Here it's a fair, decent picture of the routine of anxiety before a hanging. It's neither' so brutal nor So thoughtful as Injustice, it's on the untidy level of the experience itself—the alternating cursing, waiting, silences, blunt anger, wasted sarcasm,at the guards, reckless heroism, intimate ugliness and unselfishnes. There is one long sequenCe in the prison, with the separate toughs, neurotics, slim and other-worldly weaklings, gawping at the bars, while a Chinaman. is told his bones will be sent to lie with his fathers, while he leaves his cell for the chair holding a Buddha as a man holds reins, looking at it all the time. And the young Beal turns snivelling into his cell with the tremendous line, " Death's no fright to a Chinanian when he knows he's going to a family reunion." That's the only time the statement of pity, either by the camera or by dialogue, is clean and sure. But those who know their Hollywood need hardly be told that technically it is never less clean, less smooth. The editing and continuity are emotionally sure enough to let you forget the patency of the tension, all the nick-of-time expedients that would stand out like sore thumbs in a poorer film in this one are the five blunt fingers of a sensitive hand. We Who are About to Die is not so pretentious as its title, not so low as the mythical " gangster film." It's somewhere between any gangster film and The Hairy Ape : that is, its as confidently and brilliantly'acted, especially in the small parts, as all Hollywood crime movies, and at the other end it's more sentimental, less sententious than O'Neill. Either way, it's an evening's worthy occupa- tion for more serious men than schoolmasters. In fact, it was too serious and too good apparently for the Plaza patrons, for after a few days the truth had to give way to College Holiday, which is something else—" entertainment " probably. Z wish College Holiday had been bad and vulgar, so this notice could end on a squeak of neat outrage. But College -Holiday, though nobody's 'first-hand experience, is a favourite and third-rate myth, Hollywood's.convenient idea of American college life, with only 'the girl students as good-
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