THE CINEMA
d LET us consider the sad screen case of Mr. Orson Welles. With an established American reputation in the intelligent theatre he made a savage assault on cinema convention, and set the highbrows 4 agog with Citizen Kane. Bitter controversy raged, and Mr. Welles' 't second venture, The Magnificent Ambersons, had considerable diffi-
culty in fording a single West End cinema courageous enough to it book it. Now a third film, Journey Into Fear, has belatedly, and ✓ with some difficulty, reached the screen, and its nature is such as
e to suggest that his earlier commercial misadventures have not left Mr. Welles unscathed. For if we go to Journey Into Fear with our minds dear of premature judgements, either highbrow or lowbrow, we find -that the Wellesian mountain of exalted intention has, in its third labour, brought forth a rather commonplace little mouse. Journey Into Fear might have been appropriately tackled by several other more ordinary film-makers, and truth to tell would have been better made by most of them. It is adapted from a melodramatic novel by Eric Ambler, and although Norman Foster is responsible for the direction, Orson Welles takes responsibility as producer and as one of an intelligent cast of- actors. Yet whereas in Citizen Kane most (though not all) of the tricks of presentation were Justified by the serious attempt at an adult standard of characterisa- tion, here, in this story of greasy gunmen at large on the Black Sea, the tricks are calculated to make creep the flesh without arousing more than the faintest flicker of excitement in the intelligence. Whereas in The Magnificent Ambersons we could feel that a lively ind was using the powers of the cinema to tell us something about human behaviour, and that behind all the extravagance of technique
there lay a serious artistic purpose, in Journey Into Fear the ex- travagances are often such as completely to violate all human•expen- ence. It is true that Welles himself in a short episode attempts to sketch the Turkish Chief of Police as being naughty with the ladies, as well as ruthless with the crooks (and with a beautiful economy of glance and gesture does he do it), but this promising beginning leads nowhere, and, swamping its piquancy, we have a veritable witches' broth of pretentious but cheap melodramatic tricks of the kind which the third-rate thriller writer uses to put his exasperated readers off the criminal scent.
One's anxiety is not due simply to the fact that a young film- maker, full of promise, has made a bad film. Rather it is that the substance of the Wellesian screen intelligence may have been sacrificed not only by the industry, but by Welles himself, in favour of the shadow of Wellesian technical trickery. Provided that Orson Welles does not believe that Journey Into Fear is the only sort of film that the industry will ever in future allow him to make, we may rest assured that he will survive this plunge into turgid melo- drama. From the industry which has permitted such a waste of high talent we only ask an early solution of the problem of diversity of taste which arises from Welles' best work. One would be sanguine of the result if it were not for the suspicion that the solution which the film industry hopes to impose, without going to the trouble of analysing the evidence, is that of the man in the film renters' office rather than that of the man-in-the-street.
A naive peculiarity of the film industry these days is to believe that no star, however well established, is acceptable unless he appears in some belligerent role. The new Fred Astaire film, The Sky's the Limit, begins with our nimble-footed friend encased in the studio's idea of the fuselage of an American fighter plane arranged diagonally as if to dive. The next shot depicts the fiery and agonised end of the pilot of a Japanese Zero which Mr. Astaire is pursuing. We are about to laugh heartily at this extremely topical piece of farce when we find to our horror that this is ro dancer's dream or " film within a film " sequence, but that we are seriously expected to believe that Mr. Astaire has blossomed out as a fully-fledged " American Tiger." It is true that Mr. Astaire very rapidly finds himself on leave, and the body of the film is devoted to a singing and dancing partnership with Miss Joan Leslie, but this is sadly shortened and inhibited by the military framework within which it is set. EDGAR ANSTEY.
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