STAGE AN D SCREEN
The Cinema
" Where's George ?" At the Leicester Square.--" Boys Will Be Boys. " At the Tivoli. " The Murder Man." At the Empire.
Tins week's Grim Subject is Fun : that boisterous national form of humour which can be traced up from the bear pit by way of the Shakespearian clowns, Fielding, Hood, Dickens, until its sentimental culmination in popular rough diamond prose, a clatter of beer mugs on a bar, a refined belch or two (fun has grown progressively more refined since Fielding's day), the sense of good companionship.
This is the class to which Where's George ? naturally belongs : the story of a henpecked husband in a Yorkshire town whose only friend was a dumb animal until all the good. fellows who formed the local Rugger team persuaded him to break from home, play in the great match and win for the team. But a curious thing has happened ; into this badly acted and care- lessly directed film a real actor has been introduced, Mr. Sydney Howard, and, comic actor though he is, he bursts like a realist through its unrealities. He can do very little with the stale gags they have given him ; even the Rugger game, which might have been thought fool-proof, was made as tame as table tennis ; what emerges is a character of devastating -pathos : Mr. Howard, faintly episcopal, in endless difficulties with his feet and hands, minding the kettle in the little cramped kitchen. We arc whipped back, past the beer drinkers and the punsters and the picaresque, to the bear ring itself which began it all, to see the awkward beast driven in circles. But it isn't easy any longer to laugh at the bears and cheer the dogs on.
In the same programme is an excellent American melodrama of the depression, The Great God Gold, a story of the shady business racketeers who make money out of receiverships as the big firms fail. There are no stars, but a team of very able actors reproduce with delightful vividness the bonhomie, the plateglass manner, the annihilating lack of trust. Even the hats have been carefully chosen : the crookeder the deal, the more flowing the brim.
Boys Will Bc Boys, an adaptation of Beachcomber's chroni- cles of Narkover, is very amusing. Mr. Shortt has found ' this realistic study of our public schools too subversive for a Universal certificate. Mr. Will Hay as Dr. Alec Smart, Appointed headmaster on the strength of a forged testimonial, is competent, but the finest performance is that of Mr. Claude Dampier as the half-witted second master whose uncle, the chairman of the governors, stops at nothing, not even at a false accusation of theft, to make room for his nephew's advancement. Realistic may perhaps seem not quite the right word to describe a film which ends magnificently in a struggle between the Rugger teams of past and present Narkovians for the possession of a ball containing Lady Dorking's diamond necklace. But Beachcomber in his fantasy of a school of crooks run by ;crooks has only removed the peculiar morality of the public schools just a little further from the standards accepted outside. It bears the same relation to the truth as Candide. A free fantastic mind has been given just so many facts to play with ; nothing is added or subtracted ; but the bricks have been rearranged. The school cloisters particularly appealed to me with their tablets to old Narkovians who had passed successfully into gaol. The criminal features of the boys-were excellently chosen, and the only jarring element in the quite Gallic consistency of the film was the slight element of good nature in the boys' gang warfare.
The Murder Man shows the life of the finished Narkovian. A business crook is murdered and the guilt of the crime is fastened on his equally dishonest partner. The man is inno- cent ; and the interest of the film lies in the character of the crime reporter whose evidence is sending him to the chair. There is no more reliable actor on the screen today than Mr. Spencer Tracy. His acting of these hard-drinking, saddened, humorous parts is as certain as a mathematical formula, but this film gives him the chance, in a grimly moral scene with the innocent man he has hunted down, of showing the reserve of
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