The Cinema
"Dodsworth." At the Tivoli "Mayerling" and "Fox Hunt." At the Curzon Dodsworth is a very well-made and well-acted film, with an essentially trivial subject. Dodsworth, a retired American magnate, urged by his wife, takes his first trip to Europe in the ' Queen Mary' (the film has a breathless topicality about its inessentials). Mrs. Dodsworth is a priggish, conceited woman, her thin mundane shell is stretched above a deep abyss of unsophistication. She feels the approach of old age and grand-maternity, and is determined to get in her fling first irrespective of her husband's feelings. She begins in the ship disastrously and ignominiously with a young Englishman of half her age and ten times her experience, but she graduates slowly at the various European capitals towards a degree in well-mannerel adultery. Mr. Walter Huston is admirable as the devoted and uncultured husband who is ready to stand almost anything once, even adultery, and who cannot rid himself of the deep sense of responsibility he has accumulated in twenty years of marriage, and Miss Ruth Chatterton presents grimly the fake worldliness, em- bittered egotism, meanness intense enough to verge on real evil, of his wife. Like These Three, another realistic film produced by Mr. Goldwyn, Dodsworth is a little marred by almost incessant music, a relic of the small orchestras which used to accompany silent films. Music may be occasionally justified in a fictional film, but certainly not in Dodsworth or These Three, where the music sentimentally underlines emotional situations which have been carefully played down by the actors and the dialogue writers.
No one, I think, will fail to enjoy Dodsworth, in spite of its too liMited and personal plot, the sense it leaves behind of a very expensive, very contemporary. Bond Street vacuum flask. Naturalness is so rare on the screen that it is difficult not to over-praise any picture which possesses it, but more than naturalness is needed for deep enjoyment. " The best of them," Tchehov wrote of a few of his fellow novelists, " are realistic and paint life as it is, but because every line is per- meated, as with a juice, by awareness of a purpose, you feel, besides life as it is, also life as it ought to be, and this captivates you." Life as it ought to be—the nearest Dodsworth•comes to that is a quaint Italian villa on the Bay of Naples and the company of a too gentle, too flowerlike widow; The subject of Magerling; the love story Of the Archduke 'Rudolph and Marie Vetsera which ended with the discovery - of 'their two bodies in a hunting lodge, is equally purposeless—in the romantic manner this time; a too romantic manner for my taste. The shot which ends Marie's life leaves her in 'a lovely waxen pose upon her bed, with one becoming streak of blood and the eyes tactfully closed. Dunean's body may be " laced with its golden blood," because we are not concerned with Duncan's death so much as with Macbeth's crime, but if we romanticise the horrible end of the Archduke and his mistress, we lose. all sense of tragedy. The smashed cartilage, the face so disfigured that it was unrecognisable, the fear of mortal sin and damnation whieh must have accompanied the two shots, all this makes the tragedy, the contrast with what was young and happy. We are left with a Vienna " musical " without the music : a, pathetic ending. Granted the romantic manner the film is well made, M. Charles Boyer acts with distinction, and Mlle. Danielle Darrieux is lovely and lost and childlike. -
Undoubtedly the best film of many weeks is the coloured
cartoon, Fox Hunt. The artists, Mr. Hector: Hoppin and Mr. Antony Gross, use Technicolor with a freedoin and beauty quite outside Mr. Disney's picture-boOk range. A hunt which turns into a mechanised chase, a motorbus playing an agile part ; swollen, narcissine, dem-lent horses preening before gilt mirrors : both theine and drawings have unusual wit, but what remains in the Memory is the lyrical use of colour : the white ringletted horse ballooning Over the dark box hedges of the little enclosed garden with its Clasgear statue,-the rich autumn Min under hOof, the by- pass road lined with gay sublimated Postere.
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