The film and the public (1955)

THE FILM AND THE PUBLIC commonplace is raised to the level of a kind of epic poem. It is, I believe, this poetic quality, this quality of silent music, which makes the film so exciting as well as so moving to watch even now in these days of rich, smooth photography and the blandishments of a sound track used almost always without poetic imagination. THE ITALIAN STRAW HAT, 1927 Production : Albatross-Sequana. Direction and Script : Rene Clair. Photography : Maurice Desfassiaux and Nicholas Rondakoff. With Olga Tschechowa, Albert Prejean, Jim Gerald, and Paul Ollivier. The Italian Straw Hat established the maturity of Rene Clair as a film-maker. Though the gay stage farce by Labiche and Michel, on which the story is based, is turned into a satire, a strong element of fantasy remains to lighten the attack on the social posturing of a stupid middle-class society and sweeten it with laughter which has no trace of bitterness. Successful satire is usually the mark of maturity in an artist, since he has to keep his sense of humour alive at the very moment when his desire to attack the evils of society is at its strongest. Clair's previous films, Paris qui Dort, Entr'acte, Le Fantome du Moulin Rouge, Le Voyage Imaginaire, and La Proie du Vent, showed his versatility and, in some instances, his delicate sense of visual humour. But The Italian Straw Hat> which also gained Clair a certain notoriety because some sections of society found its satire objectionable, will remain one of the permanent 'classics' of the silent cinema. The film is made up of a succession of episodes linked together by the slender story of a young bridegroom whose horse eats part of a married lady's straw hat while she is preoccupied with a lover behind a bush in the Bois de Vincennes. This incident might have been smoothed out with reasonable diplomacy, had not the bridegroom been on his way to his wedding and the young lady's safety been dependent on returning home with her hat, if not her 116