THE CINEMA
" Le Dernier Milliardaire." At the Academy.----" The Fifth
Chair." At the London Pavilion " Son of the Soviet East." At the Taller.
THE revival of Rene Clair's Le Dernier Milliardaire, and the out- standing success of The Fifth Chair, provide an opportunity to compare examples of French and American screen humour at their respective best. Le Dernier Milliardaire is not vintage Clair: the jokes are sometimes a little forced, and the production does not flow smoothly along in a warm stream of sparkling musical humour as, for example, does Le Million. Yet here is shrewd, friendly satire of a kind which Clair has never given us from British or American studios: Clair was exportable, but the witty liaison he had esta- blished with the tools of his trade was a phenomenon of France.
The Clair method—and it is to be hoped that it survives across the Channel—was to take a situation familiar in real life (preferably a solemn one) and to re-create it in terms of those worldly-wise lunacies to which the screen lends itself by virtue of- its deceptive realism. Since dictators are apt in life to humiliate their immediate subordinates, let there be shown on the screen a dictator who orders his entourage to approach him on all-fours ; since dictators in life are given to drastic economic theories, let us have our screen dicta- tor order all hats thrown into the sea for the benefit of the mil- linery trade. And let us treat these more than life-size events solemnly on the screen, commenting on the ludicrous follies of the human race only in the musical score. To round off the dish let us decorate the satire with Gallic tolerance, permitting nothing more villainous to intrude than ultimately lovable human weakness. So it is that the dictator of Le Dernier Milliardaire is inappropriate to to-day in lacking the grisly reality of life. It is the foolishness and not the sufferings of his victims which is emphasised ; there is a basis of cynicism, gay yet mordant.
By contrast, American screen comedy is almost devoid of social comment. Indeed, The Fifth Chair is curiously unconcerned with life outside the studios. Like many other successful American comedies, it finds its humour by turning back on itself and examin- ing all that is ludicrous in the world of its own illusion. To the compere, even the interminable credit-titles are not sacred: "These are relatives of the producer . .. in fact, all the producer produces is relatives. . .."
Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Don Ameche, William Bendix and other stars poke fun at their own screen and radio personalities. A ridicu- lous hunt for a fortune hidden in the stuffed seat of a coronetted chair is an excuse only for a peering, finger-pointing tour of current Hollywood convgntion. Indeed, the whole Empire of Hokum is so firmly established that it can safely make money by attacking itself. The Fifth Chair is the funniest film I have seen for a long time ; it holds up a mirror, not to nature, but to itself and to the artificialities of the world it inhabits.
Son of the Soviet East is a pleasantly simple Russian film which begins in south-east Asia and finishes with anti-Nazi heroism on the shores of the Black Sea. The tribal songs and dances attending a young hunter's departure for the war in the west are much more entertaining than the conventional excitements of the battlefield
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