THE CINEMA
" Flesh and Fantasy." At the Odeon.—" Divide and Conquer."
At the Empire. " Airways to Peace." Generally released.
M. DUVIVIER, struggling in Hollywood to recapture the magic of his early French masterpieces (Pax de Carotte, Carnet de Bal, La Fin du /our) is standing against the tide of fashion. The quality which gave the early Duvivier films their power is one which does not fit with current studio practices. Duvivier, as well as any French director (and the best of them share the characteristic), understands the power of the individual image, the single scene or shot, which by itself can stimulate a sharp emotion, a pang of nostalgia, or throw mute light upon a subtle relationship. For Duvivier, the single evocative picture, composed with loving care and an eye for the infinite range of textures possible to good camera-work, was and still is the basic raw material from which h film must be built. Yet whereas in France the final composition bore a just relationship to its component parts, in Holly- wood the beautiful Duvivier scenes combine into a shapeless mass , ..Pf undigested and unrelated sensations. Flesh and Fantasy is an attempt to weave together within a single framework three short stories about dreams and fortune-telling. Director and cast appear through- out to be bewildered as to the ultimate purpose of their theme and in order to cover its lack of conclusions and to laugh off any charge of pretentiousness, the whole production has been set within a Robert Benchley joke. For it is the bewildered Benchley whose personal problem of superstition is to be solved by examples culled from Oscar Wilde, Lasio Vadnay and Ellis St. Joseph. The fact
that the pictorialisarion of three short stories by these writers does little to help Mr. Benchley is treated in itself as part of the joke. The illogicalities and improbabilities of the film might have been redeemed by a sustained level of fantasy, but here again the touch of poor Duvivier is uncertain—as if he were all the while wondering just how much he dare demand of the imagination of the benighted Anglo- Saxons who surround him !
It is interesting to speculate on the extent to which the sensitive, indirectly suggestive style of the early Duvivier period has been affected by the onset of baldly factual and realistic commentary-films represented these days by the flood of war compilations done in the style originally invented by March of Time. We are able now to see publicly the second of the Major Frank Capra series designed to explain to American troops the causes and background of the war. Divide and Conquer covers the period of the invasion of Western Europe which ended with Dunkirk. The pictures for the most part are real, drawing liberally upon sensational German newsreel scenes of the Nazi sweep ::cross the Low Countries. Upon the horrifying truth of such pictures is imposed a commentary which emphasises the strategical as well as the political threat to the democracies and, no doubt for the benefit of the original military audiences, examines the German tactics in more detail than has previously been attempted on the screen. (One effect of the film should be to demonstrate that the man-in-the-street in -these days is as interested to examine the tactical nature of warfare as is the soldier.) To enhance the drama of the film we see set side by side in each country the swift military fact of invasion and the earlier Nazi assurance that no aggression was intended. Capra has extracted from his material a wealth of drama and emotion and yet one misses something, perhaps a greater intimacy, a closer contact with suffering citizens in Holland, France, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, than can be supplied by newsreel material however well shot. There is clearly room for the film of contemporary history in which the work of emotional communica- tion is done by the unassisted image rather than by the bitter turn of a commentary phrase or by rolling drums of doom on the sound- track. So long as the compilation film can depend upon a supply of new and sufficiently dramatic material then it will have a function and a very valuable place indeed in the task of national enlighten- ment. The potential poverty of the method is, however, demonstrated by, any film of the kind which cannot call upon sensational material. Airways to Peace, the latest March of Time production, has little that is new to say in its visuals and in hinting at the post-war consequences of war-time air-transport routes it lacks both the courage to tackle directly the issue of control and the imagination to analyse the new concept of geography which derives from " Great Circle flying." The inadequacy of Airways to Peace may well be a comfort to M. Duvivier if he should ever sit down and ask himself whether there is any longer a place for the craftsman who finds his fulfilment in the creation of a visual pattern rather than in the composition of the rolling and portentous periods of a commentary. EDGAR ANSTEY.
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