The Cinema
THE CASE OF SERGEANT CHIBCHA. AT THE MARBLE ARM PAVILION.
The Case of Sergeant Grischa is, in my opinion, the best book which has been written about the War. It was, therefore, in trepidation that I went to see the film version which is now being shown at the Marble Arch Pavilion. The book has immense pictorial qualities : it is also a great epic, with very skilful character-drawing. It has, in fact, many of the essential qualities requisite for the making of a good film. What a chance there was for a magnificent opening scene in the prisoners' camp ! How exciting and tense might Grischa's escape from it have been ! And then—those weary months of wandering through the forests might have been made real by a few significant shots. We are given a glimpse of Grischa's vagabond life with Babka—but a glimpse which I would rather not have had. Babka was not a chorus girl disguised as a chocolate soldier : she was an experience-hardened woman, who loved Grischa more than her life. Grischa's second arrest and the subsequent months (if it was not years) which he spent in von Lichow's prison camp are sketched in lightly. The only scene which seemed to me in any way worthy of its model was the inter- view of Schieffenzahn with von Lichow. Schieffenzahn was well cast. The last few scenes showing Grischa's pathetic disposal of his property, and of his last walk through the snow, were slightly more convincing. But any real emotion which they inspired was due to the haunting memory of those scenes as described in the book rather than to any excellence in the film version.
The three conspicuous features which seem to me, more than any others, impressive in the novel are Grischa himself, the spaciousness of the canvas, and the perpetual emphasis on time—daks, weeks, months of time elapsing while Grischa waits, the human puppet of a merciless machine. Grischa should have been played by a Russian—only a Russian could have "got across that dogged despair and submission to fate. Although Mr. Chester Morris has a slightly Slav appearance, he was not equal to the task before him. The immense opportunities offered by the setting were missed, and there seems to me to be no excuse for this, for the camera has the whole world for its field, and is bound neither by light nor by distance.
But the fatal mistake in the production was, in my opinion, that the whole tempo of the film was wrong. Time, which played Such an important 'part in the unfolding of the story, was cheated of its role in the film, and time is a- factor which one cannot play it is all-powerful. CELIA SIMPSON.
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