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furniture, the costumes, the jewels, the nick-nacks and baubles might well have been ticketed with their hire price. I remember some publicity about the countless dozen tulips for Suss's garden, real tulips. But, alas, they mean little on the screen. They are overdone. It is all overdone. Except taste, which is absent. There is nothing of the finer qualities of observation and selection, of the instinctive feeling for what is right and what is wrong. There is no modulation or balance. That is a director's job and that, I think, is where Mendes fails to qualify for the task. Why, I wonder, was Mendes chosen to make this film? His previous record shows The Four Feathers, Love Makes Us Blind and Dangerous Curves — all probably estimable pictures of their kind, but that kind was not Suss. Small wonder, then, at the opportunities missed. The climax, for example. Why ignore Feuchtwanger's special emphasis on the iron cage and its history, when it offered such dynamic reference to the hanging?
Veidt we have watched since Cesare in Caligari. A parade of Borgia, Nelson, Ivan, Baldwin, Orlac, Louis XI, Gwynplaine, Rasputin and Jew. They are all here. The demoniacal laugh, the furrowed brows, the straying locks of hair. He shares with Garbo a physique rich in photogenique meaning. But since he has lost touch with significant direction, he has given way more and more to mannerisms. Some call this great acting. It is powerful but I doubt if it is great. With the exception of Hardwicke, most of the others overact, with Vosper's Karl Alexander the worst offence. Scarcely any can wear their clothes save the dignified du Maurier, who alone of the company appears to know how to manage his sword when he sits down. But the part of Weissensee, important in the book, is so clipped that from the anxious expression on his face, Sir Gerald must have been bewildered at his own presence. The sets are lavish; but then Jiinge can do this sort of thing standing on his head. Did he not design hunting-lodges for Franz Joseph?
What then is the result? I do not believe that anyone will ever make better if as good historical films than did the Germans in their heyday. Federicus Rex, Dubarry and Manon Lescaut. They gave everything (save fantasy) that cinema has to give in their attempt to bring alive the past. And they achieved nothing better than museum value. When shall we realize that the camera belongs to the present, that its concern is actuality not artificiality? The newsreel of the Marseilles assassination shown in this same programme proves this better than my theory. Its chance rendering of a living (and dying) moment transfixed the audience. What chance had the mere hundred thousand odd pounds of Suss against reality ?
Paul Roth a.
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