CONTEMPORARY ARTS
CINEMA
Meurtres." (Academy.)—"Fuga in Francia." (Continentale.) —"I Was A Communist for the F.B.I." (Warner.)—" His Kind of Woman." (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion.) ALTHOUGH it is true that the best comedians have an element of pathos about them, it is curious to go to a Fernandel film and cry all the time. In Meurtres Fernandel kills his wife because she is suffering cruelly from an incurable disease, and the film then con- cerns itself with the efforts of his snobbish and ambitious family to hush things up, going so far in their desire to avoid scandal as to have him certified as insane. Brilliantly acted by a cast largely plucked from the boards of the "Com6die Francaise, endowed with rich dialogue and splendidly directed by M. Richard Pottier, this film has no faults whatever. Fernandel, well out of the range of comedy, proves that he is an actor of infinite capabilities and, notably in his scenes with his wife and in a long speech in which he describes his dead parents, unbearably moving. The dignity of tragedy so becomes him that when, at the end, he savours triumph and grins for the first time, one is aware of a sense of loss.
Fuga in Francia is also an excellent film, a story set, as is the vogue nowadays, against backgrounds of genuine streets, cafés, stations, &c.: with their attendant clutches of amateur actors. Signor Folio Lulli, however, who takes the leading role as a war criminal frying to get out of the country, is far from being an amateur, every line of his massive face, photographed repeatedly at close quarters, proclaiming his ability to transmit the smallest nuances, the subtlest shades of thought. Of elephantine proportions, this wonderful actor treads as delicately as a gazelle through an intricate variety of emotions, and for his sake alone the film is worth seeing. The three soldiers who are also endeavouring to cross into France are perforce shadowy characters in the lee of such a man, but both they and the criminal's small son share a natural simplicity which is very effective. They and Signorina Rosi Mirafiore, who plays, with combined stolidity and sensitiveness, the part of a soon- to-be-murdered barmaid, are not professionals, the latter indeed working in a car factory for her living, but Signor Mario Soldati has directed their innate love for histrionics to good account, and they have the additional quality of looking absolutely ordinary, which no actor, however able, can altogether assume. Their ordinary and Signor Lulli's extraordinary talents are beautifully balanced to make a finely shaped whole.
I have a penchant for films based on fact, but I Was A Communist for the F.B.l.,failed to convince me that it had more than a passing contact with reality. It seems unlikely that an organisation with any pretensions- to efficiency should make such slapdash arrange- ments for its personnel. Mr. Frank Lovejoy is the agent planted in the Communist garden, but surely the most elementary psycholp- gists would have planted him away from home ? To play the traitor in front of family and friends makes so heavy a demand on a man that I cannot believe the F.B.I. ever asked it of anyone any more than I can believe that its agents pop in and out of police cars or visit superintendents in their offices. There are some exciting moments but not exciting enough to dispel the mists of doubt.
His Kind of Woman, starring dimple-chinned Mr. Robert Mitchum and bosomy Miss Jane Russell, is one of those pictures in which mystery, sex, murder and utter confusion of- purpose take turns to bewilder the beholder into a coma. I should like to yawn in its face, but I must commend to you Mr. Vincent Price who, as a ham film star on vacation, is, when translating his braggadocio screen roles into real life, intensely funny. When, cloaked and declaiming Shakespeare, he stands at the prow of a boat which slowly sinks into the sea, he redeems everything that has gone before and makes endurable everything that comes after.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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