THE CINEMA
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Black Narcissus tells a faltering story of frustration and failure. A- group of nuns open a school and dispensary in an old palace on a crag in the Himalayas. They are smitten with spots, neuroses and, in one case, lunacy. They give up the project and depart, in pouring rain, for their Calcutta headquarters. As a sub-plot, a young Indian prince marries a peasant girl. The film would not in fact be worth consideration as a piece of story-telling were it not for the fact that it is sensitively directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Press- burger, beautifully acted by a cast which includes Deborah Kerr, Kathleen Byron, Flora Robson and Jean Simmons, and designed and photographed with an almost breathtaking sense of beauty. It it indeed the work of Alfred Junge and Jack Cardiff, as designer and cameraman respectively, which makes Black Narcissus some- thing of a connoisseur's item. The settings, all of which were built and photographed at Pinewood, are masterpieces. Cardiff's technicolor photography is keyed to the knife-like clarity of the mountain air ; the greys, greens and blues are absolutely pure, and are slashed only occasionally by the scarlet and gold of rhododendron
or the lavish costume of the youthful prince. * *
According to its makers, The Beginning or the End, a film about the development and use of the atomic bomb, is not really for us at all. It is, on the contrary, designed to be shown to our descendants a hundred years hence. A copy of the film, together with a pro- jector and instructions how to use it, has been ceremoniously buried at the foot of a Californian redwood tree. What will they think of it, those people of the next century?—always supposing that there are any humans left alive, that they can still read and that elec- tricity is still available. I should imagine they will be rather puzzled ; they will certainly be deceived. The film begins with an actor who states categorically that he is Oppenheimer ; and other persons of current history are portrayed—sometimes with skill, as the Godfrey Tearle's sketch of Roosevelt, and sometimes with all the conviction of a Guy Fawkes dummy with a label saying " Einstein." Our descendants will also be led to believe that a civilian worker on the bomb knew, days ahead, that Hiroshima was to be the first victim (it was actually a secondary target), and that immediately after the explosion it was possible for the plane to circle low over the city and view the flaming ruins. For us today, if we may be permitted to express an opinion, The Beginning or the End contains by and large the worst dialogue and the worst acting of the
year. * *
Sudan Dispute, a new issue of Rank's This Modern Age series, gives us a sober and factual resume of the economy and politics of the Sudan, and then states the Egyptian and British points of view with considerable clarity and a wholly understandable bias in favour of the British standpoint. There is some good original shooting, but the film as a whole moves rather too slowly—a criticism which cannot be made of the March of Time's Storm Over Britain, a spanking analysis of our present problems and discontents, presented with a gratifying bias, also in our favour. BASIL- WRIGHT.
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