CINEMA
Dr. Knock. (Curzon.) - The Net. (Odeon.) --- Wozzeck.. (Continentale.) M. JULES ROMAIN'S famous play Dr. Knock has been adapted by M. Georges Neveux- into one of the most amusing films we have seen in London for years, a satire as malicious as it is enchanting. Its protagonist is a charlatan doctor, played with exquisite cynicism by the late M. Louis Jouvet, a doctor who, on taking over a moribund practice in the country, turns it, in the space of three months, into a hive of ill-health. Working on the theory that healthy people are simply those who do not know they are sick, he plays upon the imaginations of his townsfolk so skilfully that they develop any ill- ness he fancies. M. Jouvet drawing diagrams to prove his mythical points, or comforting those who have only just become aware of their non-existent ailments, is nothing short of superb ; his ainJrality so studiously veiled in pomposity that but for a sardonic gleam of the eye one almost believes that he has deceived himself.
Directed by M. Guy Lefranc, the film is dedicated, with the gayest of cruelty, to mocking the human race, and as examples of the latter's chronic gullibility there are collected here some divinely conceived rustics, notably M. Yves Deniaud as the town-crier and M. Pierre Benin as the schoolmaster. Each is a miracle of observation. The French have no scruples about sin going unpunished, and M. Jouvet's final triumph, when he mesmerises his predecessor, the good honest Dr. Paraplaid, charmingly played by M. Jean Brochard, into think- ing he has a grave illness, adds a final touch of piquancy to an already astringent dish.
In the same programme is a Czech puppet film based on Hans Andersen's The Emperor's Nightingale. Well animated, poorly coloured, it yet produces the requisite quota of magic.
* *
Far removed from nightingales and nostrums is The Net, taken from Mr. John Pudney 's novel, directed by Mr. Anthony Asquith and starring Mr. James Donald and Miss Phyllis Calvert. It 'con- cerns itself with that over-exercised hero of modern drama, the research worker, in this case the inventor of a seaplane, M.7. Although the atmosphere of secrecy, which, behind the barbed-wire entanglements of a research station, seeps into the private lives of its prisoners, forms the psychological background for practical flying experiments, the characters, for all their forceful quarrelling, seem to lack substance. Mr. Donald is suitably strained, Miss Calvert prettily bewildered, and yet both are flat and uninteresting. The fault lies partly in the script Ad partly in the direction, the former lacking distinction and the latter showing a tendency to shuttle its
characters about like chessmen. No one has time to get estab- lished. The number of people who are called away in the middle of a conversation is astonishing, even for a busy research station. I could wager that Mr. Robert Beatty, Miss Muriel Pavlow, Mr. Walter Fitzgerald and Mr. Patric Doonan say " Excuse me " to each other and disappear at least three times. If this film fails on the human side, however, it succeeds unreservedly in the stratosphere. All the sequences dealing with M.7. are either thrilling or beautiful, and they raise the film to soaring heights in every sense. The power, terror and grace of this machine cannot be over-estimated, and Mr. Asquith tracks it across the skies with a brilliance he denies to mundane matters.
Georg Buchner's famous Wozzeck, written in 1836, and now produced and directed as a film by Herr Georg Klaren, is the for- midably stark story of a Prussian soldier who sells his sanity to an experimenting doctor to earn money to support his mistress and their child. An impressive film, at times magnificently so, it is bathed in such appalling despair, and not only despair but a sort of fright- ening nastiness, that it is hard to judge it objectively. It is a tribute to the director and to Herr Kurt Meisel, the tormented hero, that one emerges shattered and soiled ; but it is, of course, infinitely more comfortable if a work of art can avoid also being a nightmare.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
Previous page
