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THE FILM ABROAD
THE AMERICAN YEAR
KIRK BOND
As I write, at the end of the year, the lists of " ten-bests " are being drawn up and will shortly appear in the papers. They promise to include some excellent pictures. The Barretts of Wimpole Street, The House of Rothschild, One Night of Love, Of Human Bondage, Judge Priest, What Every Woman Knows, Viva Villa — these will be found in most lists. Most lists, on the other hand, will not include Blood Money, Fog over 'Frisco, Dubarry, or The Firebird, a quartet which, with the somewhat more eligible Crime Without Passion, possibly comprehends the best filmic work done in America this year. There are, of course, Cleopatra, an admirable antique; The Scarlet Empress, an imitation of Gance on a drunk; Our Daily Bread* cruelly exposing the limitations of Vidor; and The Merry Widow, Lubitschean only in the title; as well as Milestone's pot-boiler The Captain Hates the Sea, and the usual cartoons. But it would be difficult to find five other films which contain as much good material as the quintet I have mentioned.
Some, who will admit the merits of Brown and the Hecht-MacArthur-Garmes combination, may wronder at the other three. Yet I doubt if, save Brown, there is another director in America with the creative ability of William Dieterle. In the old days he was a UFA star. He played the Poet in Waxworks, and Valentine in Faust. In Hollywood he began on foreign language versions, turned to original productions, and achieved his first success in The Last Flight, some three years ago. The following year he produced Six Hours to Live. In both films he added to an admirable sense of continuity an extraordinary atmosphere of ghostly horror and madness. It was like nothing that had ever been done before. The terror of lunacy that lurked in the one, the eerie unreality of the other, were terribly real, not simply fantastic effects. If there was a likeness, it was to Stroheim. Behind both lay the same curious and frightening sense of spiritual confusion, the same desperation of a man lost in a wilderness. Dieterle was yet some way behind the director of Greed, but the similarity wras apparent.
Last year, for his one important film, Dieterle completely forgot the deep issues of the two earlier pictures, and produced the utterly charming Adorable, all cake-icing and Dresden china, and one of the finest things of its kind since Cinderella and A Waltz Dream.
This year he has made nothing of lasting importance, but each * Known in Britain as The Miracle of Life . . . Ed.
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