Desolate Sympathy
SPIVS. (Cinephone.) — RACE FOR LIFE. (Academy.)—SCARLET AND BLACK. (Paris- Pullman.)
MOST of the week's films come from foreign parts, and the best of them comes from Italy. I Vitelloni, now rather misleadingly called Spivs, is directed by Federico Fellini, who made La Strada, and of the two I Vitelloni is stronger, though less exotic, meat. Gloomy, but infinitely touching, it is a wonderful com- mentary on provincial life, on blasted hopes, on youth and high spirits gone sour, above all on Italian life (as no visitor sees it) today. For environment comes in for as sharp and com- passionate a trouncing as the native dinginess of the young men themselves; their dismal background and non-existent opportunities for work, advancement, or a normal family life. From our snug distance, fully employed and welfare-provided, it is easy to look on Fausto, Moraldo, and the rest merely as middle-class louts on an eternal crawl between bar and billiard room, café and cinema, to sneer at their well-shod feet shuffling along deserted midnight gutters, their new-looking overcoats hunched along the empty pier. True, we don't see any of the gang looking very energetically for a job, but can presume that, if any jobs were going, the sharp-tongued families they unavoidably sponge on would push 'them into them fast enough. The saddest part about this very characteristic gang is its age : they are all around thirty, or a bit more, and clearly set for another ten, twenty, or thirty years of the same sort of life. Yet when Fausto gets pushed into marrying his girl, he has to live with his in-laws without even the pretence or the hope of a home of his own—meals together, quar- rels overheard, subservient, physically and above all financially, as if he were a child. The rest of the gang live similarly with—and on— aunts, mothers, and sisters; small wonder if their sins, like their circumstances, are pitifully small-scale—whistling at the town tart, shouting at a group of workmen, loung- ing, dreaming, doing nothing. The unsuccessful Don Juan invariably mismanages his attempts (they aren't any more) at affaires, the unacted playwright pursues every minor celebrity who comes near the place and is invariably snubbed, the singer warbles at weddings and beauty contests, grows side-whiskers and a paunch : they have none of the pathos even of pinching poverty, being obviously well-fed, well-dressed, and the life and soul of any local bean-feast. Watching, one is strung between disgust and pity, desolation and a sort of sympathy; one is desperately involved. This is one of the profoundest social commentaries I have met in the cinema—the portrait, pierc- ingly accurate, of a generation and a country's dilemma; and the story, sour-sweet, hopeless, and always human, of five well-nourished, spiritually starved, not-so-young men.
Beside it, Christian-Jaque's Race for Life, though enormously exciting, is a boys' adventure story, which, though morally all very fine (brotherhood of man, even the Rus- sians, etc.), makes factual nonsense. Henri- Georges Clouzot, that master of the art of suspense, has collaborated with the director in writing a fast, tense script with all the usual devices—ticking clocks, clasped hands—to show that time passes, people wait, and death unless forestalled is ready to pounce at eight o'clock sharp next morning. Twelve fishermen (French) struck by a mysterious illness in the North Sea send out a desperate plea for help which is picked up by a short-wave amateur (Italian) in Togoland, who sends a message to a boy .in Paris who, via an air-hostess (Polish), a blind ex-soldier (German), two airmen (American and Russian) and various varieties of Scandinavian, manages to get the necessary serum to them in the necessary thirteen hours. If the whole thing had been in the hands of schoolboys all the way along the line, I could have believed it; but that a dozen responsible adults should trust a dozen lives to the haphazard courage and generosity of strangers in five different countries, without once think- ing of getting official help, passes all belief. What on earth did they think the Red Cross, the one international organisation that pene- trates curtains of all sorts to cope with emergencies of exactly that sort, was there for? By the end of this often moving, often thrilling, but always ridiculous film my patience had heaved a sigh and expired. Slow, stylish, well acted, Scarlet and Black is a drastically cut but still in parts tedious version of Le Rouge et le Noir, with Gerard Philippe, Danielle Darrieux, and a spectac- ularly good newcomer called Antonella Lauldi. Some splendid bits (the hands-under- the-table scene near the beginning, for one), but in general the excitement of the book has been dimmed, its subtlety simplified. Director : Claude Autant-Lara.
ISABEL QUIGLY
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