The Cinema
"Clive of India." At the Tivoli MORE history, and in two very different styles. A warning caption says that British Agent, a tale of the Soviet .Revolu-
tion, is not meant to be historically accurate, yet it gives
a far stronger impression of real events than Clive of India, which does set out to render the main facts of Clive's career, though a happy ending is admittedly substituted for his
final suicide. Mr. Ronald Colman, I think, was not a good choice for the part of Clive, though he handles the adventures with plenty of spirit and defends himself with dignity against his jealous accusers in the House of Commons, later on. Mr. Colman, however, is a famous lover on the screen, and so Clive's domestic affairs, though neither dramatic nor historically important, have to be emphasized and lingered over. His wife, Mary (Loretta Young), is always wanting him to settle down at home, and India is always calling him back. These reiterated scenes soon become :tedious, and they take up more time than . the Indian sequences can safely spare.
Naturally, no film could cover more than a few sections of Clive's long and compliCated career, but most of the more celebrated episodes are here duly included. We see Clive marching off through a rain storm, with a handful of men, to take Arcot by surprise ; there is a glimpse—happily not prolonged—of the Black Hole of Calcutta ; and the battle of Plassey, complete with war elephants, is a wild and whirling spectacle in Hollywood's most lavish vein. Also—although the circumstances are changed—we are allowed to see Clive forging Admiral Watson's signature to the Omichund treaty. But nearly all the film, to my mind, has the air of an artificial construction, made in the studio. There is scarcely any open-air photography, and no strong breath of India ever comes from the screen. The root of the trouble, I believe, is familiar enough : Clive of India is built round a single star part, and the most critical Years iii British-Indian history cannot be reduced to the scale of a personally romantic drama. Any convincing record of those times should surely be imbued with a feeling of destiny at work : by which I mean that individuals were constantly impelled by an apparently immediate necessity to perform certain actions, and the interweaving of those actions led to far-reaching results which no one clearly foresaw. Clive himself was a soldier who became, almost insensibly, an administrator ; yet the film, once Plassey is over, turns to his later years in England, where his fight with slander gives more opportunity for personal emotion.
"British Agent." At the Regal British Agent is not only more up to date in setting but far more modern in style. The dialogue, free from faded rhetoric, is unusually neat and pungent, and the action moves swiftly through a series of short episodes instead of passing laboriously from one set scene to the next. The story, inspired by Mr. Bruce Lockhart's book of reminiscences, i3 about Stephen Locke, a' young diplomat who is left alone in the British Embassy at Petrograd after revolution has sent the Ambassador home. He has no official status but is expected to do all he can to prevent the new Soviet Govern- ment from signing a separate peace with Germany—a task which gradually draws him into a network of White intrigue. He falls in love with Elena, Lenin's secretary ; and Elena, loyal to the Soviet, helps reluctantly to ruin his plans. This kind of situation is very familiar on the screen, but the relationship of Locke and Elena has more human quality than usual, for Mr. Leslie Howard and Miss Kay Francis act their difficult• parts with sensitive restraint. The story has various improbabilities—for instance, the reading aloud by Locke, in Elena's hearing, of a coded letter from London —but the chaotic atmosphere of the time is so well rendered that a few queer events, more or less, hardly seem very important. Even the far-fetched climax, when Locke and Elena are waiting to be blown up in a White arsenal, is undeniably exciting ; and the whole film, though in some respects a fairy tale, does vividly suggest the throes of a country struggling between death and new birth. CHARLES DAVI:.
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