The Cinema
"Jazz Comedy." At the Academy—" Two for Tonight." At the Plaza Jazz Comedy is the best thing that has happened to the cinema since Rene Clair made The Italian Straw Hal. Alexandrov, who has been awarded a Soviet Order for his direction, has produced, just as Clair did then, out of the smallest resources. and apparently with poor quality film, a picture of almost ecstatic happiness. It is a freer happiness than Clair's, rougher, less sophisticated : behind Clair"s films is always a sharp, smooth, satirical Gallic air, the faintest odour of the most expensive hair oil ; you never get further away from Paris than the dry herbage outside the gramophone factory where the ex-convict listened to the song from the horn of a convolvulus.
But Alexandrov's story of a shepherd who was mistaken by a rich snobbish woman for a famous conductor and who later, after a series of wild accidents and coincidences, became the head of a jazz orchestra in Moscow, has a simple irrele- vance quite unlike Clair's tight expert tales. The opening sequence, when the shepherd leads out his flocks and herds, of sheep and goats and cows and pigs, to graze by the seashore, is the most lovely a moving camera has yet achieved, as it follows him with the quickness of his long stride over hills and rocks, streams and verandahs, while he sings, knocking the tune out on the slats of a bridge or the bars of a paling. And if something of the kind has been done before, in Congress Dances and Walt Disney's cartoons,: to convey ,a sense of lyrical happiness, this at any rate is completely original : Alexandrov's use of a moving camera to convey the grotesque in his long panorama of a crowded bathing beach. The wealthy woman in pyjamas swaying her munificent hips along the shore in pur:iuit, of the famous conductor is followed by the camera behind a close-up frieze of enlarged feet stuck out towards the lens, of fat thighs, enormous backs, a caricature of ugly humanity exposing
• pieces of itself like butcher's joints in the sun: I have no wish to criticise this film, but simply to rejoice in its wildness, its grotesqueness, its light, taking tunes, a sense of good living that owes nothing to champagne or women's clothes. If .Alexandrov sometimes seems to dwell too long on an incident, at least no one has shown a richer comic invention, for, like Clair and Chaplin, this director has worked to his own scenario ; it is to Alexandrov we owe the conception as well as the execution of the magnificent sequences when the shepherd pipes to the rich woman's guests and the notes bring all his animals trampling out of their enclosure, up the steps of the hotel, in at the windows, to eat and drink the feast laid out in honour of the conductor. The tottering tipsy bull, with the dignity and lack of humour of a King's Bench judge, who is laid to sleep in the woman's bed, and the pig who lies down in a dish and the drunken guest who tries to carve it belong to a fantasy more robust than Clair's. .
This is genuine cinema : few English titles are needed.: there is action all the time, a minimum of speech. Two For Tonight depends on dialogue. It is a very amusing and well-written entertainment ; Mr. Ring Crosby is attrac- tively commonplace among the stars ; Miss Mary Boland and Mr. Lynne Overman are two of the most reliable players.
. . So this picture forces one to write, in terms of actors and authorship. The camera has played a very small part in the entertainment. -Even a spirited battle in a restaurant with soda-water syphons could have been transferred at a cost to the stage ; and the studies of a theatrical magnate, of an Austrian producer turned manservant, of a madman with a passion for noughts and crosses would have been even more amusing behind footlights.
Sometimes one is inclined to believe that characters can all be left to the stage ; the cinema generalises. It is not one man called Kostia who sings his way through Jazz Comedy, but all brave, coarse and awkward simplicity..
GRAHAM GREENE.
Previous page
