The Cinema
"The Robber Symphony." At the Palace Theatre—" Th2 Emperor's Candlesticks." At the Curzon—" The Littlest Rebel." At the New Gallery HEIFIR FRIEDRICH FEUER'S The Robber Symphony is certainly the most interesting 'Km of the last twelve months, heretical though it is, a picture cut to synchronise with the music. Containing Moments of really sensitive direction, it goes on for nearly two hours, restless; scatterbrained, anumany,— boring, cheap, lyrical, farcical. The story is derived rather obviously from Emil and the Detectives, but with a superrealist atmosphere foreign to the agreeable common sense of that fantasy.
I think one might be more ready to surrender twits charm if one did not detect a certain complacency, a conscious withdrawal from the Corruption of the commercial film, in its painstaking irresponsibility. Virtue can afford to be charit- able, and all those who have occasionally enjoyed the corrupt pleasures, the bright facile excitements of popular entertain- ment will feel as if an old friend (vicious, of course, but not always unamusing) has been too priggishly reprimanded. There is a didactic note, that is the trouble, in a film which promises to be peculiarly carefree and irrational from the moment when a symphony orchestra of a hundred musicians in curiously-shaped bowler 'hats begin to play the overture. The story is excellent, leading improbably up to the superb sequence of four player-pianos dragged across the Alps behind a monstrous wine barrel containing a gang of robbers in pursuit of a fifth player-piano, in the mechanism of which, unknown to the boy in charge of it, lies a stocking filled with gold pieces. The gold pieces have been stolen by the Robber with the Straw Hat (an admirable piece of grotesque miming by Mr. Michael- Martin-Harvey) and deposited in the piano, which belongs, to a-family of strolling musicians. The robbers pursue it to a mountain village where the Man with the Straw Hat holds,the attention of the people with a rope-walking act, while the others produce four identical pianos drawn by four identical donkeys withthe complex idea of confusing the boy and stealing his piano. This whole sequence is delightful-: one of ...the best pieces of direction and invention I have seen, genuinely irresponsible, but even here it is the music which .dictates the pace, and as a result the mind moves quicker than the camera. To the credit of the music, though, it may be said that one is seldom conscious of the silence of the actors.
Herr Feller calls his picture the first "composed."
but in so far as his experiment is original, it it barren.. In order to synchronise pictures with music in this way he found it necessary to shoot 600,000 feet of film ; the synchronisation is perfect-but the cost is enormous, and the object—I do not quite know. what the object is. • Herr Feller composed the music, wrote the story, directed the film, but the music (of which I am no proper judge) surely does not -require illustra- tion. There seems to be a confusion of thought which prevents the picture—or the music—being quite the master- piece which had been intended—intended, for there is no doubt about the herdic self-confidence of the director.
To return to our corrupt friend—never more so than at the. New Gallery where Miss Shirley Temple appears in a very sweet and very simple tale of the American Civil War which culminates, as" these dramas always do, with an appeal to Abraham Lincoln to save somebody—in this case a father, in Mr. Drinkwater's play a son, in The Birth of a Nation a lover—from being' shot. I had' not seen Miss Teniple before : as I expected there was the usual senti- mental exploitation of childhood, but I had not expected the tremendous energy which her rivals certainly lack. A film like this makes one sympathise with Herr Feher's puritanism : it Is a little too enervating. If one must have disreputable enjoyments, let them have the glitter of The Emperor'sCandk- slicks, an absurd Edwardian tale of Polish plotters and secret doeuthents hidden in stolen candlesticks, of a beautiful police agent and an idealistic revolutionary, acted in hi usual sad, worried and endearing Way by Herr Karl Ludwig Diehl.' Good direction, fair acting and the attractively Baker Street dresses make 'this a.pleasant film to doze at.
GRAHAM GREENE.
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