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the street with a crashing crescendo of music welling up, forcing itself into the consciousness, clutching the spectator right into the drama and suspense of the moment.
The crowd scenes, the " incidentals " subtly weaving their atmosphere of reality, are fully representative of what Hollywood can do when it tries. The milling crowds on the elevated railway, from which Rose gets her first glimpse of the tragedy in the boarding house, the mass of humanity miraculously springing from nowhere as the shots are fired, the boy on the bicycle ambling down the middle of the road as the girl walks out of it all — these and a hundred other little details add their quota to a film that reveals thought and intelligently planned construction in every foot.
As for the people in the boarding house, it would be unjust to single out any player for special honours, but I cannot help feeling that Sylvia Sidney was the one actress possible for the part of Rose.
We repeat — Street Scene is a fine piece of craftsmanship which' overcomes the limitations that many people thought would prevent it being filmed filmically.
Ralph Bond.
BOOK REVIEWS
Walking Shadows. An Essay on Lotte Reiniger's Silhouette Films, by Eric Walter White. The Hogarth Press.
An interesting and worth-while essay this, done by a man who not only knows what he's talking about — which, it is true, can sometimes, though not here, be as much of a nuisance as a virtue, depending on what one wants to say — but is sufficiently discerning to choose aspects of his subject which make it eminently worth reading about. In other words, he has accomplished an essay (less critical than informative) free of any taint of the tedious proselytising streak your essayist (either through some fault of his constitution, or maybe the constitution of essay writing itself) sooner or later nearly always acquires; particularly, of course, if his essays are about his fellow men. That suggestion of omniscience mixed with condescension, that episcopal and missionary-like inability to refrain from meddling in the affairs of others, so characteristic of our time, and those who write on cinema.
Thank goodness, here is someone with the gumption to go straight to his subject, whose interest is in disclosing it, in examining it, rather than in muddled pyrotechnics. Madame Reiniger has hosts of admirers, many of them still wondering how she achieves her incredible fluidity in spacial illusion. Let them read this little book, that is what it's about.
Not always does she work alone — I think I am right in saying this, though maybe it should go into the past tense, since I am reading about