THE CINEMA
The Southerner " and " Food—Secret of the Peace." At the London Pavilion.—" Dillinger." At the Dominion and New Victoria.—" Perfect Strangers." At the Empire.—" To the Shores of Iwo Jima." At the New Gallery IF The Southerner had been twice as long I should still have wanted to see more of it and this is in spite of the fact that I have never been very fond of that old film script about the Man, the Woman and the Soil. You know the situation. The couple who take a plot of land and a tumbledown shack so that they can be their own masters. The cold winter which brings hunger and the spring which brings sickness and trouble. The quarrel with the neighbour which only resolves itself when they struggle together to land the giant old fish. Finally the torrential rain which pounds their crop into the soil. And yet Jean Renoir with a master's touch made me feel that I had never heard the story before. From the moment the little girl runs into the bush to eat the fox-grapes and is followed by her grannie, whose greed is stronger than her fear of snakes, you are in a real but enchanted world. This is life and these are human beings whose fortunes we follow with such absorbed attention. Not the conventional mannequins we are usually shown, but living people with human emotions and relationships. Renoir, who understood so well his own French people, has at last grown up again in America and he sees that country with a clear eye and a warm heart. All the way through the film the characters are so well understood that never for a moment do any of them falter or cease to ring completely true. And this is true of everything that happens in the film. The strange, vicious fight with the beer bottles in the bar, the behaviour of the wal-ped neighbour in the affair of the milk, the pigs and the idiot and the hilarious, drunken, wedding party. And yet although they ring true they are unlike anything that we have seen on the American screen. All the actors seem to have been inspired to forget their old tricks and get inside the people they are playing. Betty Field, who can with a small smile make any other Hollywood star look like a marble statue, is excellent as the wife, and Zachary Scott is a worthy partner for her. Beulah Bondi presents a terrifyingly accurate picture of an old age which is verging on second childhood. This is definitely a film to see not only because it is a fine piece of film making but because it is first-class entertainment.
There is a nice piece of cold factual reporting in the film Dillinger. This film lacks all the flash and sparkle of the great gangster epics but is probably a good deal nearer the truth than they were. It tells the story of one of America's more notorious criminals and it tells it in such a way that one's attention is held without one enjoying the experience at all. A gangster's life as shown here consists of a few moments' excitement with revolvers and tear gas interspersed with many months in hiding, sitting about in dreary back rooms, or spells of a few years in prison. In its dead-pan way it is a neat piece of film making, and the acting of Lawrence Tierney as Dillinger and Anne Jeffreys as his rather dim girl-friend exactly fits the mood of the film. The last sequence, where she takes him to the cinema for his first outing after months indoors, is extremely exciting. She has informed against him, and while the police surround the building ready to shoot as soon as he comes out, he sits and enjoys a _cartoon. For a moment. the gangster and his girl become pathetic symbols of a warped attitude to life and ,achieve a certain importance. Then the guns go bang, bang.
I did not believe one word of Perfect Strangers and I don't believe that anyone else did either. Every now and then there was a flash of the old Korda, but it was a very brief flash and then we were back in a completely unreal world. The pleasant enough story of a husband and wife who join up in the war and who become strangers to each other is told -with a lack of the sincerity that might have made it a very good film. One important point, howe,rer. Korda and cameraman Perinal have presented us with three extremely attractive women and in this pleasant task they have been more than helped by the delightful acting of Deborah Kerr, Glynis Johns and Ann Todd.
Food—Secret of the Peace, from the National Film Board of Canada, surveys the world food famine. The commentary is very good and there are some extraordinary shots of 3 Black Market raid in Paris which tell you more. about food shortages than any statistics. The other short, from O.W.I., is a colour film of the invasion of Iwo Jima and is a frightening reminder that the conquest of Japan was more than the dropping of an atomic bomb.
ALEXANDER SHAW.
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