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They do it humanly; not with sweat on their brows in the old Russian manner, but with sweat at the midriff, in the new. That is the quality of Men and Jobs, and it is the most pleasant and most powerful sign in cinema since Pudovkin made a mess of his Simple Case. That was undoubtedly the most important failure of all in the period of experiment.
To round off the point, it is well to recall these intermediate films. The General Line fell back melodramatically on a poisoning kulak to make drama of co-operative farms. It devoted its intimate observation — by default — to a milk separator. Earth similarly introduced a murdering kulak. Turksib with drought, desert storm, and snow-bound winter, fell back on the elemental appeal of epic. Thunder Over Mexico went, with equal romanticism, to Mexico. Counterplan used sabotage ; problem enough for the Russians, but still, in a sense, a secondary problem. No one thought, like Sydney, to look in his heart and write, or film, the really intimate and therefore more dramatic problem of a nation at school. The soldier had come from the war, the peasant was in the factory, and a sorry job they were making of their new and bewildering world. In A Simple Case Pudovkin knew where the matter lay. He knew they were deserting the home front with their filibustering records of ancient victories, but did not know what to do about it, except by imagistic reference to death and resurrection. So conscious, indeed, was he of the problem that he said it all in Deserter. The home front was all in all, however difficult. But, in the very act, he himself deserted, as you will remember, for the machine guns of the Hamburg streets. Back, in other words, to blood and battle again. Even when he described his Russian factory his heart was not really in it, for he did not take the trouble to observe either his factory or his factory workers. Men and Jobs is the more important, therefore. It takes the trouble to observe both. The acting is not yet in the highest cinematic tradition, for it is not sufficiently integrated in the action, but that technical plaint is relatively unimportant. The ideological advance means everything.
John Grierson.
THE SONG OF CEYLON
Production: John Grierson. Direction and Photography: Basil Wright. Assistant Direction: John Taylor. Music: Walter Leigh. After twice seeing The Song of Ceylon I still find it hard to criticise. The first of its four sections I would call the most powerfully enchanting piece of documentary anyone has yet made. It shows the annual Buddhist pilgrimage up endless steps to the summit of Adam's Peak, where the Buddha set his footprint before leaving the earth. The choice and handling here of realistic detail
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