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Wessely, a Viennese stage actress, gives a remarkable performance, very cleverly conveying a real depth of character while overtly playing a precisely opposite part. Olga Tschechowa, who was in The Student of Prague, gives a beautifully controlled performance. Willy Forst, who was responsible for the foreign version of Unfinished Symphony, has made a very smooth job of the direction. There is some delightful music, and the atmosphere and settings are both realistic and impressive.
The Rialto announced a season of continental films and began with Jeanne, directed by Tourjansky. This was scarcely an auspicious beginning. The story, which is sincerely told, is about a girl who falls in love with a rather aimless young man whose mother wishes him to marry money. In order to save him from disgrace she undergoes an illegal operation and her child dies. Eventually they marry. The greater part of the film is set in the 'eighties, but it is entirely ruined by an absurd epilogue set in 1934 in which the couple, now elderly, having adopted a daughter, bemoan the fact that their own child (who would have been called Jeanne) died. There is a lot of dialogue, very well translated by means of superimposed titles, and it is excellently acted. Gaby Morlay plays the part of the girl, and her performance should be seen.
J. S. Fairfax-Jones.
MEN AND JOBS
With Men and Jobs we have light in the East again. The Russian directors, after a long period of what they would call, no doubt, ideological difficulties, have found material and issues of material which they can warm up as effectively as they did the material and issues of the Civil War. Men and Jobs is about workers and, peculiarly for a Russian film, about workers who find their heroism in work. In the great period of Petersburg and Potemkin they found it in war. The melodramatic excitement of blood and battle prompted and formed the bludgeoning power of their cinema.
Peace-time preoccupations followed inevitably. They were more sober. They, too, involved struggles — but with illiteracy, lack of skill, lack of organization. They involved, for the first time, a certain observation of people and affection for them. The Russian cinema, with its old epileptic technique, wilted visibly. The directors could not interpret, and the technique could not handle, the new situation. Experiment, even failure, were necessary. Men and Jobs is significant of the new approach. It demonstrates how a bunch of workmen set themselves to achieve the tempo of American technique in building a dam; and it is not the dam which is the triumph, but the tempo.
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