CONTEMPORARY ARTS
CINEMA
Mourning Becomes Electra. (Carlton.)—Deadline. (Odeon.)— My Six Convicts. +(London Pavilion.)
MR. EUGENE O'NEILL'S Mourning Becomes Electra is a work ill- suited to the screen, being almost exclusively verbal and con- fined to the small circumference of a Palladian mansion. It is beautifully acted by a tine cast, Messrs: Michael Redgrave, Raymond Massey, Leo Genn and Kirk Douglas, and Miss Rosalind Russell and Madame Katina Paxinou ; but what emerges from their exquisitely sensitive performances is the fact that Mr. O'Neill's play does not really merit such reverent treatment. Greek tragedy bears so little relation to life as we know it that it should, I think, make no attempt at the modern idiom. Only in poetic cadences can its high emotional content reach our heartsv and Mr. O'Neill is very far here from being a poet.
Mr. Dudley Nichols has approached his hard directional task with consecrated steps, and, though he has done a really magnificent job, the importance of his earnestness is not apparent. At no moment is one uplifted or moved, and it says much for the cast that at all times they command an interested attention. Miss Russell, looking for three quarters of the film like a thwarted black umbrella, makes her thankless role almost credible ; Mr. Redgrave brings to his guilt- complex an almost feasible madness ; Madame Paxinou is almost able to rouse pity. Nobody is quite successful. Beating their wings against a cage of words, they strive to soar, and there are no upsurging syllables to lift them.
That the Press should be both free and clean is indubitably a desirable thing, and Mr. Humphrey Bogart, his face strained with sincerity, is at the Odeon this week attempting to rescue the free clean paper he edits from being sold by Miss Ethel Barrymore and her venal daughters to an unscrupulous rival. In order to prove to his patrons that it is worth saving he digs deep into the cesspool of gangsterdom, hauling to the surface spicy revelations concerning a thug, thereby risking death and considerably increasing his paper's sales. Nobody seems to notice that, though still patently free, the front page is not as clean as it was, and Miss Barrymore, full of admiration at Mr. Bogart's courage, decides not to sell out. Written and directed by Mr. Richard Brookes, Deadline is a good workman- like picture, groaning with authentic atmosphere, with the ghastly noise and confusion of news in the making, the goings and comings of reporters and the " hold-the-front-page " technique. Though it is intelligently scripted, and in addition is blesSed by the brief presence of Miss Kim Hunter, on a hot afternoon one is apt, or rather I was apt, to wonder whether I cared if any paper, free, clean, fettered or dirty, came out at all.
Mr. Donald Wilson wrote an excellent 'book on his experiences as a phson psychologist, and this has been adapted, with some distortions, for the screen. As the doctor Mr. John Beal looks so much in need of psychological care himself—such a sad distraught little face—that it is hard to give credence to his numerous successes, to his taming of killers, to his quelling of an impending riot. As far as one can judge, his method of reaching the subconscious is to get as many convicts as possible to sign as many forms, and it is not made quite clear how this benefits either them or the community at large. Still, the film goes at a good pace, and there is a nice assortment of " characters," great toughs with hearts of gold who eventually rescue the Doc from being used as a hostage. Of these Mr. Millard Mitchell and Mr. Gilbert Roland make the firmest impression. Directed by Mr. Hugo Fregonese the film is almost exactly like all prison films, following, as needs it must, the same clanging concrete pattern of its myriad predecessors. One cannot, after all, do any-
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