CINEMA
" Flesh will Surrender." (Curzon).—" Passionelle." (Cameo- Polytechnic).
FoLLowING his brilliant and moving performance in Open City and To Live in Peace, M. Aldo Fabrizi is not the slightest bit brilliant or moving in his latest Italian picture, Flesh will Surrender. This sad lapse is due, I am sure, to the fact that he is an actor of such integrity he cannot help, when playing the part of a dreary civil servant, being tremendously dreary. The script does nothing to help him at all and the direction is snail slow and easily anticipated. The ruin of a spineless individual, first by an adventurer and second by a woman, could, like every other human experience, stir one to compassion or at any rate compel one's sympathetic understanding ; but in this instance, though the film is based on a novel by d'Annunzio, the situations seem unbelievably corny. Most situations are, but it is usual to present them with a certain subtlety. M. Fabrbi's clerk is so unremittingly simple-minded he might well be real—which, oddly enough, is intolerable. Passionelle is taken from a novel by Emile Zola called Pour Une Nuit d' Amour, the story of a rich young girl just out of a convent who murders her lover and persuades a poor gawky Post Office employee—the civil service is having a bad time this week—to dispose of the body and take the rap. For all the sordidness of its tale the film is strangely tender. It is brightened by delicious flashes of wit and there is the pleasant cosiness of village life encircling the tragedy. -Mlle. Odette Joyeux, fathered by the incomparable Alerme and silently adored by faunlike M. Roger Blin, gives a most sensitive performance, and M. Edomond Greville can be complimented on manipulating the emotional lights and
shadows so that they blend effectively. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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