Revival
HARVEST. (Academy.)---HousE OF SECRETS. (Gaumont.)---NIGHTFALL. (Astoria.) MARCEL PAGNOL'S nineteen-year-old Harvest, censored off our screens when it first appeared and now shown for the first time, and uncut, in this country, is, though rather shapeless and episodic in form and rather too slow in pace, one of the most moving films we have seen for months. After bewailing, some weeks
back, Pagnol's dreary effort to bring Daudet to the screen, it is refreshing and reviving to meet his old grand manner again, with sun- light and landscape used as an integral part of the story, and the audience being made, as it were, to stumble across the obscure lives and intense humble joys--the tender, unselfcon- scious realism of his style giving a feeling of intimate participation, rather than critical watching. It is a story of regeneration, the regeneration of land gone to waste. Panturle is a giant of a man living out a squalid existence in the corner of a deserted mountain village, without the incentive to work himself out of his squalor; Arsule, a frail but chirpy little woman, not very young or very pretty, the property, more or less, of a knife-grinder who picks her up cheap after she has been raped by fifteen men in a row. The two of them—both, it would seem, inescapably un- fortunate—meet, fall in love, flee the not very ferocious knife-grinder, install themselves in the empty village and decide to grow corn on the land and fill the deserted streets with children. Their plan begins to take shape— an old man gives them a plough, a farmer lends them seed, the first villagers return, the first child is conceived. There are moments of extraordinarily simple beauty: the time Panturle brings home a loaf, and Arsule can hardly believe the luxury of having bread again; the time she first sweeps and tidies, and lays the table with real napkins; the time an old paralysed man looks down on the gleaming ploughshare he made in his vigorous days. This old film shimmers with sunlight, and you can hear, through the country silence, the faint country noises.
Rouse of Secrets is a fair-to-middling British thriller about forgers in Paris, and Nightfall a' highly confusing thriller from Hollywood about a couple of thugs who care- lessly leave $350,000 lying about.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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