CINEMA
Prince Valiant. (Carlton.)—Hell and High
Water. (Odeon, Marble • Arch.)----- Henrietta. (Cameo-Poly.) HAVING been so Often accused of interpreting history in comic strip terms, Hollywood to Prince Valiant goes the whole way, expensively adapting a comic strip to CinemaScope. "Adapt" is perhaps scarcely the word; Prince Valiant, the adventures of a Holly- wood Viking among the Knights of the Round Table, remains aggressively, unadulteratedlY true to its origins. The hissing of boiling oil, the tinny clatter of swords against armour, the bellowing of the extras got up as Vikings: all stereophonically resounding from around the cinema, are not, fortunately or unfortu- nately, noisy enough to drown the dialogue. I "I want you to get acquainted with ihY knight," announces Valiant—Val to his I 'friends—to his Princess; "Your footwork is terrible," complains the knight known as Sir Gwain, while instructing Valiant in oswordplay ; and a running commentarY keeps the audience in touch 'with, the progress of the tournament. Hardened critics 'probably enjoy this kind of thing more than the ten-year-olds, who are likelY to be purists in such matters. Robert Wagner, somewhat obscured beneath 3 black wig, Janet Leigh, a princess straight from high school, and James Mason, playing the treacherous Black Knight with grim and misplaced determination, partici' pate in this undeniably energetic farrago' The script, it should be put on record, is by Dudley Nichols; The Long Voyage Home' and even Mourning Becomes Electra, seem 3 long time ago.
• • • explosions, underwater battles between sub- Marines, and bursts of military music produce such a stereophonic racket as to !al/lust, behind that the cinema is °ellig dismantled one's back.
Julien Duvivier's Henriette skittishly con- siders the problems of two screenwriters in search of a film—the one holding out for a simple story of young love, the other anxiously inventing all the paraphernalia of crime, sudden death and chases over the rooftops, and both manoeuvring the charac- ters to suit their purposes. The idea has Possibilities, though not, one feels, very tidally; if the basic story (itself a slender earlesque of a whole genre of romantic comedy), sustains the interest, then the writers' squabbles, the interludes elaborately satirising screen melodrama, only distract; if not, the enterprise appears laboured as well as synthetic. And, in fact, there seems little to choose between the love story as played straight, involving entanglements with a conscience-stricken pickpocket (amiably played by Michel Auclair) and a circus rider (Hildegarde Neff), and the variations intro- duced by the more excitable of the two collaborators. A malicious joke at the expense of another screen-writer—Prevert- comes off neatly; for the rest, Duvivier's flashy, tricked-up style lacks the light touch that might have carried the film.
PENELOPE HOUSTON
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