"St. Martin's Lane." At the Carlton
THE CINEMA
THIS is an extraordinary film, for it denies nearly all the accepted canons of the box-office hierarchy. The hero is far from
handsome, the heroine, though extremely good-looking, is mean, selfish, grasping, petty-minded, and completely unscru- pulous. No character in the film attans, or seems likely to attain, any of the conventional happiness of screen finales.
As the film takes its course, a memory begins to glow in the mind, and heightens rapidly to a flame ; the producer, Erich Pommer, was the genius behind many of the films of the great German period ; the actor, Charles Laughton, is more than reminiscent of Emil Jannings, who starred in Pommer's most
famous production, Vaudeville ; the atmosphere is redolent with the detailed intimacies of Murnau's The Last Laugh, Pabst's Joyless Street, Czinner's Nju. " The Goldin age
begins anew "—or is it only a final statement of account, a reassertion by Pommer of what once was great and moving, but has been utterly destroyed by the temptations of Hollywood and the lash of Dictatorships ? Whatever the answer, there
can be no doubt that St. Martin's Lane will arouse a strange perturbation in the hearts of all those who remember with true
gratitude the days when films from Neubabelsberg were of the first importance ; and if it carries with it something of a shadow from the Vaults of Death, it also—at the very least—reminds us that the progress of cinema depends on sincerity rather than novelty. It is, in fact, an essay in the grand manner.
The story is very simple. A busker (Charles Laughton) who makes his living by reciting " The Green Life of the Little Yellow God " to theatre queues, meets and adopts a young girl (Vivien Leigh), who is a homeless waif with some skill in the stealing of cigarette-cases. She can dance, and has ambitions for the stage. The busker calls in two others of the profession, and evolves a new turn which can include the girl ; and then he falls in love with her. Needless to say, she deserts him, becomes mistress to the young impresario whose cigarette- case she had stolen, and with calculated ferocity forces her way to stardom. The busker meantime (shades of Jannings) goes steadily downhill and becomes a habitual drunkard. They meet ; a passing pang of sentimentality impels her to try to get him an engagement. At the audition he recites " If " to a group of very hard-boiled theatre folk, realises his failure, and returns, with optimistic gait, to busking.
It is perhaps drab and depressing ; it certainly is not con- vincing ; but it is exactly what Pommer needed. Here are all the opportunities for that realism which the camera only can observe and analyse, and for that deft delineation of people's psychologies which only a sympathetic combination of producer, director and actor, and editor can achieve; a very special mood.
Thus, although the London settings are most essentially London, yet the observation of them is the observation of that misty township (is it Pabst's Vienna, Lang's Berlin, Lubitsch's Paris ?) in which the grave tragedies of cinema have proudly moved. The girl dancing through the shadows of an empty mansion ; the neat squalor of the busker's attic ; the staircase, the family downstairs, the pubs, the gutters ; they are a fine synthesis of what the sensitive German thinks of the underdog, and of the world where money means only food and lodging. Pommer's sensitivity and Tim Whelan's American quickness have given of many of these scenes some of the dark beauty of disillusion.
There remains the question of Charles Laughton. The comparison with Jannings is not entirely a compliment ; for against the great power of acting one must put the equal danger that comes 'from a sameness, not merely of appearance, but also of character. With both of them, but especially with Laughton, one has always been uneasily aware that he knows one is watching ; the illusion becomes self-conscious. A film actor should never reveal that awareness. Nevertheless, in this film Laughton gives quite the finest performance of his career, and it is by sheer acting technique, not to say the electric discharge of his personality, that he forces us, in that great scene where, tortured to desperation, he turns on all his friends and walks out of the house, to examine our own hearts, not his. At this moment we do not delight, as in the rest of the film, in the
actor ; we live in the man he portrays. BASIL WIUGHT.
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