CONTEMPORARY ARTS
CINEMA
III Unwanted Women." (Rialto.)—" Halls ol Montezuma." (Odeon.)—" Dark City." (Carlton.) Unwanted Women, though sincerely attempting to give a heart- rending study of life in a D.P. camp for women, has only succeeded in being another gloomy picture. The dramatic highlights, which include Mlle. Valentine Cortese having a baby without medical Bid, and a charge of rain-drenched women to the barricades do not make up for the film's curious lack of inspiration. This hetero- geneous horde of women speaking every language and having the good fortune to include Mesdemoiselles hancoise Rosay and Simone Simon have lost, we are led to believe, countries, homes, families and those precious "documents." Thy are stranded like flotsam In the wake of war, without love or comfort—incidentally is it possible that women who are not, after all, in _prison, would tolerate such bleakness, would not pick a flower from the camp garden or beg a duster with which to make a curtain 7—but though helpless and hopeless, the grief one should feel in their presence, the shame and the pity, are never evoked.
Shame is all too painfully evoked in Halls of Montezuma— shame that one should be so wildly excited, so profoundly stirred by the sights and sounds of war. This film is directed by Mr. Lewis Milestone and, as are most American war films, it is devoted to the activities of a Marine platoon on a Japanese-held island. Mr. Richard Widmark is ostensibly playing the leading part, but in very truth the protagonist is war ; war in magnificently Techni- colored detail—grey ships on grey seas, red fires, black smoke and the clean bright silver of projectiles. How lovely are the messengerst of death. Mr. Milestone's characteristic style, his love of comparisons, his moments of bathos, his addiction to symbols, is with us yet, and though some may not be wholly satisfied few will deny that the hand of a master is printed here. From the operational, explosive point of view this is certainly the best war film I have ever seen, If by best one means the most awe-inspiringly lethal.
Dark City is the story of how a gang of card-sharpers is picked
off one by one, like the little nigger boys, by the psychopathic brother of a man it has fleeced. It introduces a new star, Mr. Charlton Heston, in a role which demands nothing but an ability to brood bitterly over the stinkingness of the world and to reject the slavering -advances of Miss Lizabcth Scott. Poor Miss Scott. She has a tough time. Spurned by her love she pours herself into a succession of sequin moulds and croons a succession of sombre songs, to fill in the time between murders as it were. She is a great bore and so, but for Mr. William Dicterle's direction and a superb bit of acting by Mr. Dean Jagger, would be the film.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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