The Cinema
murder in a country village and the mob of crime reporters from Fleet Street who settle down at the local pub. and unscrupulously manufacture good copy. Nothing, a novice might think, could be easier than to catch reality with a camera, and yet this shy bird evades almost every English director. There is a moment in Mazurka when an experienced womaniser kisses an awkward adolescent girl. The director cuts up from her bewildered eyes, as the mouth presses home, to the electric globes hanging from the ceiling : they mist, disappear, come back to view again, and the uneven mixture of passion and practice has been vividly conveyed. Mr. Desmond-Hurst's Sensation never comes so close to life, and as its failure is typical of English films, perhaps I may be for- given for discussing its unrealities in sonic detail.
It is never easy for a film critic, who has no sight of the script, to apportion responsibility between actors, writers and director. Mr. Desmond-Hurst has obviously been handi- capped by his cast. Mr. John Lodge, who plays the smart crime reporter, remains dumbly dependent on a stony and protuberant jaw, and there is a persistent Oxford and B.B.C.
undertone to the synthetic accents in the local bar. The only players who help illusion are Mr. Anthony Holies as a reporter, Miss Athcne Seyler as a fortune-teller, and Miss Joan Marion as the murderer's wife.
Now for the screen play. A cowardly " commercial " murders one of his many girl friends, a reporter robs a bed- room, finds a clue to the crime and bullies the murderer's wife into supplying his paper with her love letters, the details of her private life, her small son's picture, in return for money to defend her husband who stands no chance of acquittal. A promising plot, which could be handled with pity and anger, but the genuine situation is lost in false trails, in an absurd love story, in humour based on American films, and in the complete unreality of the " murder gang."
There remains the director, and I am afraid he has con- tributed little to illusion. The lovers drive down Fleet Street before one of the worst faLse backgrounds I have ever seen. The Yard detective picks up a hammer, which he believes the murderer used, with his bare fingers and carries it with hint into a crowded café. Worst weakness of all, two independent situations which depend for their effect on accumulating excite- ment—the fortune-teller in a fake trance describing the crime in the presence of the murderer, the crime reporter questioning the murderer's wife--are run concurrently, the director cutting from one to another, so that the excitement of each scene drops like a stone at every cut. Bad casting, bad story construction, uncertain editing : these are the three main faults of English films.
Mazurka leaves a rather sinister impression. The first
twenty minutes—the scared duel between the adolescent girl (beautifully acted by Ingeborg Theek) and the middle-aged expert in sexuality—are admirable. With the appearance of Miss Pola Negri Herr Willi Forst seems deliberately to guy not only the melodramatic tale of an unknown mother and a good woman's ruin, but the star herself. Miss Negri's tech- nique belongs to the War years and the silent film. Forst Makes her run across rooms, bound along streets, a crazy corsetted Cassandra in 1917 draperies. In a scene of drunken seduction which is like an ancient still from Mr. Rotha's album, the villain (with long Svengali hair and the manner of a lion tamer) props tipsy Miss Negri against the doorpost while he takes down his top hat. Miss Negri may be unwise to return to the films, but it is a cruel idea of fun to guy this stout, glossy, gesticulating woman for the pleasure of audiences who have forgotten the star of Lubitsch's Forbidden Paradise. .
SECOND OPINION.
" Every pert little miss who fancies herself an embryo star should, in a spirit of awed humility, take this opportunity of studying tho methods of an artiste whose passions come from the heart, whose voice is vibrant with feeling and whose emotions are expreFsA with every Sbre of her being."—Sydney Carroll on Miss Negri.
GRAHAM GREENE.
Previous page
