Never Sere
WITHIN hailing distance of sixty, Clark Gable still epito- mises something that refuses to date or fade. Fashion dictates the life-span of actors (at least at the jeune premier level: which, whatever his age, is Gable's) even more than the life-span of actresses. Look at old films to see. Lilian Gish or Mae Marsh seem charming still, even if the style of womanhood has changed. But Valentino, or even the more recent John Gilbert—however can they, in how- ever remote an age, have aroused the response they did? Gable scores by being, quite simply, outside the fashion, like the eccentric ladies in the British Museum Reading Room. That box- shaped head to which a pair of ears seem in- securely fixed, and which from any angle looks quite strikingly like that of a large, battered, grizzling, prowling tom-cat; those movements, cat-like too, with their suggestion of padded speed and stealth that is at once feline and masculine; that out-of-date moustache; those Neanderthal shoulders and that barrel-chest rather dwarfing a pair of merely adequate legs—none of these could be called in the smallest degree fashionable. Nor does he, like the real swoon-provokers, appeal to a single category of women—teenagers or maiden aunts, the simple or the sophisticated. His charm is general, diffused, unforced, a mix- ture of roguery and amusement, of worldliness, sexuality, anti good, clean fun.
It hardly matters, given these genial qualities, what sort of a part he gets: Clark Gable will play himself. In The King and Four Queens he is more himself than ever, one of those wander- ing cowboys alone in the world with a horse, a gun, quick fists and sharp wits, whom we first meet at the end of one adventure riding down an almost perpendicular slope to escape a pursuing posse and landing, with the inevitability of these things out West, directly in another. This is a Western, funny rather than heroic, about the explosive effect of a man like this on four pretty young women isolated for two years under the stern domination of Ma, their mother-in-law, after the death of three of their husbands and the disappearance of the fourth (no one know- ing, rather inconveniently, which one of the four escaped or which of the wives is not a widow). Two blondes, a brunette and a red-head all set their (very varied) caps at the stranger, while Ma (a splendid piece of toughery from a leathery Jo van Fleet) alternately doubts and trusts. The bald facts of the story—how Dan and his final choice among the widows make off with the old girl's treasure—sound merely callous, and the ending has a cheerful immorality about it that should make Mr. Hays sleep uneasily at nights. But none of this matters, for if Gable is beyond fashion he is beyond morals too, and all he asks is not to be taken too seriously. Director : Raoul Walsh.
The Counterfeit Plan would be an ordinary flat British thriller but for some rather fancy technical stuff which almost amounts to a teach- yourself-forgery course, and a pleasant worried- terrier performance from Mervyn Johns. Other parts have been handed out with such a confusion of nationalities as to make nonsense of them.
Director : M ontgomery Tully. ISABEL QUIGLY
Previous page
