CINEMA
Casque d 'Or. (Academy.)—Dedee. (La Continentale.)—Les Miserables. (Odeon.) Tins is a grand week for slumming ; a grand week for brothels, rainswept quaysides, lust, cheap hotels, dustbins, cruelty, murder and good plain misery. Casque d'Or and Dicke, both French, both sordid, both excellent, the first set in 1898, the second in the present, not only share the same theme, that of a prostitute who falls in love and loses her lover in tragic circumstances, but also, so as to blur their outlines into further confusion, share the same star, Mlle Simone Signoret. Spending the whole day, as I have, in her sultry company, seeing her abused both physically and mentally by two centuries of male, watching her fall in love twice, with M. Serge Reggiani in Casque d'Or and M. Marcel Pagliero in Dedee, only to be thwarted of happiness in one instance by the guillotine and in the other by bullets, it is hard not to be haunted by the abnormal weight of suffering she has had to bear.
Of the two, in Didee, directed by M. Yves Allegret with all his talent for atmospheric detail, Mlle Signoret, lingering lovelorn amid the dockyard cranes of Antwerp, has the firmer hold on tragedy. Beautifully supported by M. Bernard Blier as a kindly night club proprietor, M. Dalio as a pimp, and Mlle Jane Marken as a fellow poule, she gives a fine performance, tender-tough, soft-cynical, credible and touching. It is a harsh film and a dismal one, the flowering of love in such a wide field of disillusionment making a dramatic impact which is very effective, but does little to pierce the gloom.
Casque d'Or, brilliantly directed by M. Jacques Becker, breathes rather more freely. Before M. Reggiani kills his rival and darkness settles once more on Mlle Signoret's love life, there is dancing, singing, sunshine and merry badinage. The background is meti- culously detailed and every character, whether spiv, apache, bourgeois or blade solidly wrought. Brutal and squalid in its way and with a shocking finish it yet keeps its distance and leaves one admiring but emotionally undisturbed
As for Les Miserables, Victor Hugo's chronically immortal masterpiece, it is, under Mr. Lewis Milestone's skilled guidance, a sound professional bit of work ; not altogether inspired and yet on occasions, such as in the galley sequences, the manning of the barricades and the final chase through the Paris sewers, firing the imagination. Mr. Michael Rennie, rescued at last from traditional British phlegm, shows that he too has a volatile spirit, and his Valjean is powerful and convincing. Frankly, I did not know Mr. Rennie had It in him. As the policeman who pursues him with relentless, determination through the years Mr. Robert Newton, fine actor though he is, is handicapped by his manner of speech, by a voice which it is impossible to divorce from Oxford surroundings, from St. James' Street or the clink of teacups. As a sinister instrument of Gallic law he is about as plausible as a steward of the Jockey Cltb. In a chorus of English voices—Mr. James
Robertson Justice, Mr. Edmund Gwenn and Miss Elsa Lanchester join the hero and villain to accent the anglo in this international venture—Miss Debra Paget's natural preference for the nasal way of speaking strikes an uneasy note. She is pretty but off key. In his use of light and shade, in his emphasis on symbols—a candle, a hat, a hand—Mr. Milestone has produced moments of visual beauty, and yet his Les Miserables, like its predecessors, distils the very essence of boredom.
In this lugubrious week, when human nature seems at its most base and the world vile, there is one small raft afloat on the black seas. At the Academy the shortsighted Mr. Magoo makes a brief but oh so welcome appearance. This absurd character devised by Mr. John Hutley for a series of animated cartoons cannot fail to- take a stranglehold on the affections. Mr. Magoo in his blindness once played tennis with a walrus and here he is now enjoying a game of golf with a bear. Mlle Signoret should meet him some time. It
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