; Contemporary Arts
A Poor Maid
St. Joan. (Leicester Square Theatre.) — The Happy Road. (Dominion.) — The Hidden Woman. (Paris- Pullman.)—Marguerite de In Nuit and Seven Years in Tibet. (Cur- • zon.)
0111) PREMINGER, director, and Graham Greene, scriptwriter after Shaw, a (mostly) good cast and a totally inadequate Maid have between them given us an uneven film ver- sion of St. Joan that is not quite Shaw and not quite anything else. Though the play is compressed, scenes are chopped about, half the epilogue goes at the beginning and two quite unnecessary ex- pansions—a preliminaries-to-the-torture scene and a burning-at-the-stake scene—are popped in for bad measure towards the end, Mr. Preminger has generally resisted the temptation to 'go big,' to show us battles and large-scale business of the sort. True, we are shown the coronation, with A disgruntled Dauphin picking his nose and Joan in gleaming new armour, looking like St. George in Where the Rainbow Ends; and a large num- ber of extras must have been employed around the stake. But the movement and pageantry and outdoor hurly-burly are mostly left to the imag- ination, as Shaw meant them to be, and there is no attempt, praise heaven, to bridge the gap between the Maid's acceptance by the Dauphin and her downfall with scenes to justify her mili- tary reputation. Which is all as it should be; but the impression remains (which is not as it should be) of a stage play with set scenes and all the unities, and of a director not quite sure what to do with the overwhelming lot of material he has at hand and the overwhelmingly theatrical Shaw at his elbow. Mr. Greene's alterations and interpolations seem rather pointless than useful : we see the court at its little games, are brought up to date with some totally unfunny additions to the epilogue, get the hens-laying-eggs scene but lose, for some reason, the kingfisher.
As for the acting, with two important excep- tions it is excellent. Sir John Gielgud makes War- wick just the tempered, cold antithesis to the Maid he was intended to be, a man with the awful ability to pour not only cold water but (far more lethal) cold humour on enthusiasm : too polite to sneer, the very movement of his nostrils is an insult to someone like Joan. There are sur- prises, but some good ones, in the cast : Richard Todd, warm and sane and in an agreeable sense worldly as Dunois; Harry Andrews, eccentric to the point of dottiness as the patriot cleric de Stogumber. Anton Walbrook's accent confuses things in an already too polyglot cast, but his Cauchon has the right manner for the Holy Office, which Felix Aylmer as the Inquisitor fur- ther sweetens and makes more sinister. Bernard Miles makes much of his few moments as the executioner : his 'I am not addressed as fellow, my lord' puts even Gielgud in his place. But after such an impressive list of performances, Richard Widmark's Dauphin seems wildly over- acted, and poor Joan quite blasted off the screen in her schoolgirl and even touching inadequacy. Jean Seberg's performance as the Maid would have been applauded in a school play, where everything else was immature and two-dimen- sional and the swords were all of cardboard; she has the rounded flesh over fine hard bones of a good photographer's model, and can look pretty even when shaved nearly bald, which is saying a good deal; but she has nothing else— neither the training to act nor the understanding or personality to make her get away with lack of training. There is nothing remotely Joan-like about this soft little girl—no sense of sanctity, no inspiration, no real ardour or ruthlessness or singlemindedness or any of that alarming self-righteousness (or God-righteousness, if you like) that so shook her judges. Her performance should surely teach film-makers that you cannot expect a girl to act one of the most difficult dramatic roles that exist just because you happen to like her face. It seems unkind to the poor girl, who puts up a creditable enough performance in the circumstances and cannot (few of us being born Joans or even understanding the Joan mentality) be expected to do any more.
I generally dislike films about children because the children in them seem to be quite unlike the children one ever comes across in normal life. The Happy Road is an exception and a thoroughly charming one, a film that manages to be simple and childlike without being simple-minded and childish. Two children, an American boy and a French girl (Bobby Clark and Brigitte Fossey), run away from one of those smart international schools in Switzerland to join their blessedly un- international respective parents (Gene Kelly and Barbara Laage) in Paris; parents, police and half- NATO join in the chase to find themselves powerless against the wiles of hordes of accom- plice children in every village the fugitives pass through. The most engaging aspects of French life burst into bloom round this mercifully un- moppetish pair, the acting is as good as it needs to be, and as a NATO general unrecognisable behind a huge horizontal moustache Michael Redgrave brings a whiff of administrative idiocy so authentic as to leave you rubbing your hands with almost painful glee. Director : Gene Kelly.
Roberto Galvadon does wonderful things with his photogenic Mexican countryside, and The Hidden Woman (La Escondida) is remarkable for its brutal and magnificent landscapes and the virtuosity with which such simple things as trains crossing broad plains are treated. Pedro Ar- mendarez gives his usual good lowering per- formance, but the characters are flat and their behaviour keeps appearing, not flamboyant, as I think it ought to, but theatrical.
I would not recommend Claude Autant-Lara's tasteless, longwinded and distinctly sour-smelling modern version of Faust, Marguerite de la Nuit, in which an old man falls in love with Michele Morgan as she sings in a night-club, sells his soul to the night-club owner (Yves Montand) and is turned into a perfectly dreadful youth for his pains, for anyone's consideration if it were not that Hans Nieter's Seven Years in Tibet, based on Harrer's book and on the films Harrer himself took for the Dalai Lama while he was there, appears in the same programme and is well worth a visit. Harrer's strangely coloured, faintly wobbling and altogether fascinating authentic parts alternate with a—by contrast— rather phony-looking and half-fictionalised ex- planatory part, through which the late Esme Percy's precise voice comes with a suitably mysterious chill. Harrer himself appears, a con- siderable asset, it turns out.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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