Cinema
TO CATCH A THIEF. (Odeon.)—THE GLASS SLIPPER. (Empire.) - BLACK TUESDAY. (London Pavilion.) To Catch a Thief, Alfred Hitchcock's new film, shown to the Queen last Monday, is not by any means worthy of the high honour accorded it. A comedy-thriller based on a novel by David Dodge, it is only passably amusing and never thrilling. Certainly its dialogue, at times, is crisp in a corny sort of way, and its visual humour, on occasions, bears the inimitable hallmark of its maker; but taken by and large it is a terribly haphazard affair, a sort of charade acted by experts in which both the players and the audience, in a polite party spirit, cheerfully flounder. The setting is the South of France, the matter a series of jewel thefts of which Cary Grant, a retired burglar, is falsely accused. Grace Kelly and Jessie Royce, Landis—the latter is delightful—provide the inevitable Texan oil queens dripping with diamonds; John Williams is a Lloyd's insur- ance broker;. Brigitte Auber a pert French adolescent. Across their paths herrings, crim- son to the gills, are strewn in redolent heaps, and indeed for the first twenty minutes of the film the camera- spends its time netting dozens of suspicious-looking characters whom it eventually throws back as being too small. The plot remains from first to last extremely con- fused, a perplexity of police and criminals, of pursued and pursuing. Neither are the charac- terisations at all clear, Miss Kelly's personality in particular undergoing a series of esoteric changes which are hard to follow. The photo- graphy is poor, and altogether it seems that Mr. Hitchcock has become overconfident, casually slapping together his sequences like roughly cut sandwiches in the hope that the filling will prove distracting. It is hard to be- lieve that this is the best film on the current market, or that anybody should have thought it was in the royal class. But then, of course, we are sticklers for tradition, and it has never been de rigueur to show a good film at a Command Performance.
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The Glass Slipper is simply Cinderella; or at least not simply, for it boasts of two ballets by Roland Petit and has a slightly sophisticated air; the story, too, has been leisurely tampered with. All the same, it is charming, the spell it casts being almost wholly due to the wizardry of its protagonist, Leslie Caron. She is surely quite the most attractive actress of the gamine school, with her indiarubber face which now resembles Judy Garland, now Audrey Hep- burn, and sometimes even Micky Rooney. With her French accent, her delightful dancing and that touch of pathos which is her most endearing quality, she brings to this picture a lovely radiance. Michael Wilding makes a per- sonable prince, and the fairy godmother, meta- morphosed into a dotty old lady who lives in a wood, is amusingly played by Estelle Win- wood. This character has strayed out of Alice in Wonderland and comments on life with a White Rabbit logic couched in non sequiturs. She is very funny. Directed by Charles Walters, the film is pretty, tuneful and thoroughly pleasant.
Starring Edward G. Robinson, Black Tues- day is an intensely bad gangster film. It con- cerns the escape from the death cell of a killer- racketeer and it has evidently been given a very bumpy time by some uncredited authority which has seen fit to fade out shots when people are still speaking and jerk them about with the cutting scissors. The brothers Lumiere would not have been proud of this film. It has nothing whatsoever to recommend it.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM
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