The Cinema
SOBER, worthy, humourless, Rhodes of Africa unrolls its eleven well-bied reels with all the technical advantages of 1986. It
is a good film, judged by the ordinary standard, well photo- graphed, well directed, well acted, particularly by Mr. Oscar Homolka as Kruger. with some fine shots of African scenery.
It is the kind of respectable picture (there was another NOI11e years ago of Livingstone) which reminds one a little of a biography by a modern Liberal : someone kindlier, more
trustworthy, infinitely more charitable but not less dull than Lord Morley, with the anarchistic point of view of a man who never makes a moral condemnation. October. another his- torical picture made as long ago as 1928 by Eisenstein. is a curious contrast, restless, excited, crackling with venom •: this is certainly not fair, certainly not Liberal (the sub-titles spit out " Mensheviks '' as one might exclaim " Rabbits !" whenever these toothy well-meaning politicians in pince-nez pass across the screen).
Nobody concerned with the English film, neither its German director, Mr. Berthold Viertel, nor its American star, Mr.
Walter Huston, has any passionate conviction whether for or against Rhodes and his work in Africa. Miss Peggy Ashcroft as a most unlikely woman novelist—one imagines she is intended for Olive Schreiner—rebukes Rhodes for his treatment of the Matabele in her usual gentle, carefully enunciated, Shakespearian tones, flickering her young romantic Juliet lashes at stated intervals with the effect of too Ai punctuation ; but the emphasis otherwise is all on the good side of human nature : Barney Barnato, Kruger, Jameson; Rhodes himself, the king of the Matebele—there is something to be said, that is the impression, for all of them ; the kindly optimistic Liberal temperament does not recognise the Fall
of Man. After ten days I can remember very little of this film but a sense of gentle titillation, of being scratched agreeably in the right spot.
But the talkies have come, and stereoscopy and colour no doubt will come, without destroying the vivid memories of October : Kerensky hounded from the capital by a camero which never fails to record with merciless caricature the gleam of gaiters, the Napoleonic gesture, the neurotic hands, the thin frightened defiant egotistical face, the braces hanging over the chandelier in the Tsar's bedroom ; the macabre and comic Battalion of Death, large ungainly women in uniforms as shapeless as policeivomen's, adjusting their stockings and brassieres as they sprawl across the billiard-tables in the Palace, or wandering hand in hand, like affectionate hippo- potami, through the great tank-like rooms ; the huge crowds fleeing, in the July days, before Kerensky's machine-guns ; the women in lace petticoats and picture hats stabbing out the eyes of the young agitator with their parasols ; the scene, which recalls the Odessa steps sequence in The Cruiser Potemkin, when the bridges are raised between the workers' quarters and the city, and the ancient unhorsed cab is balanced for a while high above the river before it rushes down the long perpendicular slide.
To me the most vivid impression of revolution (and one which only a participant would have thought of presenting) was the committee-room door swinging continually open, the people pushing in and out, the telephone bells ringing, the crowded secretarial rooms, the shouting to make yourself heard, the little rabbitty scared people getting up and proposing resolutions. Compared with Mother, October is almost comedy ; Kerensky inspecting the Tsar's foot- men, weeping among the sofa cushions, playing with the royal decanters, is a figure for laughter ; the film has some- thing of that air of happiness Trotsky described in his history : " the colossal task, the pride in success, the joyful failing of the heart at the thought of the morrow which is to be still more beautiful than today." I suppose somebody once felt that about Rhodes too, about his Cape to Cairo ambition, the amalgamation of diamond-mines ; a good film might have been made about it all in those days ; now as an Empire are too old, the pride isn't there, the heart seems to hay.;
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