THE CINEMA
Break the News gives the impression that everyone concerned was trying to prevent Rene Clair from making a Rene Clair film ; indeed, one is inclined to wonder at times whether Clair himself was not an unwitting partner in this nefarious plot—but such base thoughts are dispelled by occasional flashes of that pristine lightning, which in the old days illu- rhinated the normal in such a way that it became part fantasy and part lunacy. The fact that the flashes are so rare and that much of the film bears no recognisable hallmark of the master is all the more remarkable in that most of the incidents seem to be made for him. There are the misted lamps of the night streets, sinister and sentimental at the same time, straight from Sous les Toits. There is the upsetting of a perfectly seriotn. stage scene, just as there was in Le Million. And there are scenes of Ruritanian turbulence and confusion which in their bare essence are not so different from many incidents one recollects gratefully from A Nous la Liberte or Le Dernier Billiardaire. Can it be that we miss what, were we not con- sidering cinema, we might call the divine spark ? Or is it that the spark has misfired for once, and that later all will be well ? Most of us will prefer the latter view.
Take it all in all, Break the News is an amusing film, but its amusements are spaced out too widely in a wilderness of direc- torial indecision. The story tells of two chorus boys who attempt to get publicity by faking the murder of the one by the other ; the idea is that the murderer will be arrested and tried, the murderee will make a dramatic appearance at the trial just before the death sentence is pronounced, and thc subsequent sensation will get them starring engagements on all the halls. Unfortunately no one is at all interested,in the disappearance of a minor chorus boy, and when in desperation the murderer makes a dramatic confession during a Venetian song-scena, the murderee is being mistaken for a Bosvinian revolutionary and incarcerated in a Balkan dungeon. It is hardly necessary to say that after much suspense and excite- ment all ends well. It is possible that only Rene Clair could handle the somewhat macabre central theme without making it offensive to taste or to the mood of the film. In the good old days of Le Million, when probabilities did not worry him, he would quite certainly have made it very funny. But in the present instance the aforementioned directorial indecision takes a heavy toll of humour. In the condemned-cell scenes, chiefly perhaps owing to the passionate sympathy all right-minded folk are bound to feel for Maurice Chevalier, but also owing to their slow and deliberate handling, the whole film nearly topples over into sentimental melodrama ; and Jack Buchanan's frantic race back to London is told in thriller terms rather than as slapstick. We must, in the end, be content with a few inspired moments which give us Buchanan changing hats at top speed in a street revolution, and the fantastic idiocy of Chevalier's sudden confession. For the rest, we may remember that the earlier Clair films were too French to be popular in France ; perhaps Break the News will be the rage of Paris.
Pseudo-poetry is beginning to capture the dialogue writers, and Test Pilot is full of high falutin' speeches personifying the sky as a cruel mistress, whose face Clark Gable lovingly slaps, and who is a fierce rival to the more immediate tiptilt of Myrna Loy's impudent nose. Gable, as a test pilot, employed to see how fast a new plane can dive before its wings are torn off, makes a fine performance of his whirlwind wooing, and Myrna Loy gets a chance to do some serious acting for once as the earth-bound member of the triangle. Unfortunately, the validity of the film cannot stand up to the superb reality of Spencer Tracy's performance as the pilot's inarticulate mechanic. His sympathetic understanding of the wife's agonies is so delicately and yet so firmly etched that we catch more than once a glimpse of the more essential truth. He is a great actor. The aerial scenes are of course terrific. In fact they are every bit as good as, but no better than, the aerial scenes in Hell's Angels, which was made nearly ten years ago.
BASIL WRICIFF.
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