Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

TELL ENGLAND 177 a thrill of pleasure to the spectator. Some of the opening images, for example, of Ray and Doe bathing by the weir are beautiful — fair hair and slender limbs and bronze throats photographed from below against a filtered sky. The solemn shots of barbed wire in no-man's-land are immensely impressive. And, again, during the landing scenes there is beauty in the shots of the sparkling Dardanelles, with the black shapes of the lighters floating diagonally across the screen, and in the loosened head of a drowned soldier moving gently to and fro in the lapping waves. This is pictorialism such as is rarely seen in a British film. But Asquith fails when he is faced with the problem of making his players act. His knowledge of cutting is not sufficient to enable him to dispense altogether with acting, as the Soviets do, neither is his experience of directing actors wide enough for him to tell his story by these means. In consequence, we have the painful performance of Fay Compton, labouring under a theatrical technique, as Mrs. Doe; the curious, frank naturalness of Carl Harbor d as Doe; and the stilted, untrained and undirected behaviour of Tony Bruce as Ray — all of which conflict with each other to produce a peculiar, unnatural self-consciousness that will receive hard measure from the average audience. Such experienced and clever actors, on die other hand, as Frederick Lloyd and Denis Hoey evidently took their parts into their own hands and played them irrespective of the direction. But if this film was to have relied on its story, it needed a Gary Cooper, a Jack Holt or a Wallace Beery to give it strength. The limits of Asquith's acquaintance with the many ways M