The Cinema
" Song of Ceylon " and "Musik im Blur." At the Curzon. --" The Dark Angel." At the Leicester Square Doc, I suppose, ought not to cat dog, otherwise. I should be inclined to cast a malicious eye towards my fellow film- reviewers who have gone into such curious Gothic attitudes of reverence before what must be one of the worst films of the year, The Dark Angel, writing of " classic tragedy " and the " great " acting of Miss Merle Oberon. It is the ballyhoo, of course, which has done it : the advance gossip . and the advertisements, the crowds outside the cinema on *hp opening night, the carefully drilled curiosity as to what Mr. Sam Goldwyn had done to Miss Oberon's eyebrows. .
Song :of Ceylon, on the other hand, made by. the G.P.O. Film Unit and directed by Mr. 13asil Wright, is introduced as a second feature into the Curzon programme with little notice from the ecstatic . connoisseurs of classic tragedy, although it is an example to all directors of perfect con- struction and the perfect application of montage. Perfection is not a word one cares to use, but from the opening sequence of the Ceylon forest, the great revolving fans of palm which fill the screen, this film moves with the air of absolute cer- tainty in its object and assurance in its method.
It is divided into four parts. In the first, The Buddha, we watch a long file of pilgrims climb the mountain side to the huge stone effigies of the god. Here, as a priest strikes a bell, Mr. Wright uses one of the loveliest visual metaphors I have ever seen on any screen. The sounding of the bell startles a small bird from its branch, and the camera follows the bird's flight and the notes of the bell across the island, down from the mountain side, over forest and plain and sea, the vibration of the tiny wings, the fading sound.
The second part, The Virgin island, is transitional, leading us away from the religious theme by way of the ordinary routine of living to industry. In The Voices of Commerce the commentary, which has been ingeniously drawn from a seventeenth-century traveller's account of the island, gives place to scraps of business talk. As the natives follow the old ways of farming, climbing the palm trees with a fibre loop, guiding their elephants' foreheads against the trees they have to fell, voices dictate bills of lading, close deals over the telephone, announce through loud speakers. the latest market prices. The last reel, The Apparel of a God, returns by way of the gaudy gilded dancers in their devil masks to the huge images on the mountain, to a solitary peasant laying his offering at Buddha's feet, and closes again with the huge revolving leaves, so that all we, have seen of.. devotion and dance and the bird's flight and the gentle communal life of harvest seems something sealed, away fron?i , us between the fans of foliage. We arc left outside with the , bills of lading and the loud speakers.
Musik im Blut, also at the Curzon, is a quiet agreeable film of a music academy. It lets one down more :gently than most commercial films would do after Song, of ,Ccylem, becatise in its own more Conventional way it too ,is a film of integrity and truth. We ,believe in the music academy," the freshness and unsephistication of the students', Iove, the sad awkward mingling of art' and adolescence. A' story of which the cliniax is the performance of a prizewinning concerto seems closer to one's piperience than the silly . sentimental war story of The Dark Angel : the girl who is ; loved by her two cousins from childhood, who deePs with one of them during his shOrt leave 'from the front and who, = when she believes that he is dead, is about to. marryother when she finds' him again, blinded and hiding from her.
Although everyone Wore the clothes and coiffures. of 1935 , (I particularly liked Miss Oberon's hat in her opening, sequences), this film belongs to the Lyceum melodramas of the Weir years, Seven. Days' Leave and 'flowery cardboard sets and old retainers. A very manorial, very feudal film, in which the yOung squires go off to fight after family prayers, while the butler and the chauffeur show becoining emotion and a few aristocratic women keep stiff. bps before the upper servants, it is one you should go a very long way to avoid.
GRAIIAM GREENE.
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