The Cinema
"Merlusse." At the Curzon "The. Day. of the Great Adventure." At the Film Society "Desire." At the Plaza • FRENCH schoolboys supervised in their small asphalt yard, in their cold stone dining hail, in their dormitory where a master sleeps in a square muslin tent : Nordic schoolboys (strictly speaking Polish, but their blond hair, their simple handsome brutish faces are exactly those of German boys) washing their shoulders in the snow, pillow fighting in a mountain hut, ski-ing alone across the wastes: The contrast is extreme, and I cannot help preferring the French.
Merlussc, directed by Marcel Pagnol with a cast of Which only the principal player has appeared on the screen before, is a slight sentimental tale of a one-eyed master 'feared' by the boys and distrusted by his colleagues, who' on Christmas night finds a way to the affections of the twenty boys left by their parents at the school. We are told that it is a true story of the Marseilles Lycee where Pagnol once a master and where the scenes are taken. But that 'Matters less than the fine acting of Henri Poupon as Mer]usse (" Codfish "), with his terrible dead twisted eye; his Serubby beard, his starved paternity, and his secret terror of the boys he has to control. Pagnol's direction has a simpleness, directness that are admirable. . . As for the children, how much more agreeable and varied they arc, how much less aggressively healthy and priggish and normal than the Boy Scouts who in the Pnli;i1rmoun- tains. down a gang of cocaine smugglers in the Tatra These scrubby, rather miserable, and not too clean
children, smoking illicitly round the corner of the asphalt yard, boastful over first love letters, not above getting. sonic- body else to leave a drawing pin on the master's chair, over- grown louts and curly Fauntleroys, a nigger, an 'Asiatic, a Jew, these might well include in their number a Rimbaud, a Cezanne ; but as for the Boy Scouts with their communal song, their unnaturally developed sense of honour, their portrait of Lord Baden-Powell, their parade at ei.cifing to salute with raised arms the Flag, the best that any of these can become, one feels, is a Hitler—or not even a Hitler,- but a Hitler's lieutenant to be purged on some thirtieth OVJUne. This film has been awarded medals at Venice and Miskow. Stalin's youth and Mussolini's youth both found it, I suppose, inspiring, but in this country, happy thought, it is still possible to find their well-drilled morality a little absurd. Particularly delightful to the comic sense is the moment when three Scouts, who for the most honourable and civic reasons have 'found it necessary to violate their Scout oaths, surrender their whistles to the Scout captain. Their whistles are accepted, but u tele- gram from Warsaw at the last moment directs the captain to return them. Yes, it is still possible for us to laugh, but not with too great an assurance ; it is' theSe and not the French who are nearer to the English public::sehool spirit, and it is an Englishman's portrait, not Pilsudski's or Hitler's, which hangs on the wall.
Desire—ridiculous and misleading title—is the best film in which Miss Marlene Dietrich has appeared since she left Germany, and the most amusing new film to be seen. in London this week. Produced, though not directeii, 'by Lubitsch, this comedy of an international jewel thief •who smuggles her stolen pearls across the French frontier in -the pocket of an American " hick " on a holiday (one of Mr. Gary Cooper's best performances), and who while she 'tries to retrieve them falls in love with the hick, has all the absurd delicious trimmings one expects in a Lubitsch film. Best of all is the sinister old female crook who remarks, " If I were your grandmother, you'd offer me some brandy." • Miss Dietrich is allowed to act in this film, even to sing, and what memories of the cheap alluring cabaret figure, the tilted top-hat, that husky voice recalls. But since those .days Miss Dietrich has been so tidied, groomed, perfected that one simply cannot believe that she exists at all—though there, are moments in this film when Absolute Beauty very nearly wavers into the relative, the human, the desirable.
GRAHAM 'GREENE.
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