Screenland (Jun-Oct 1932)

for ] une 19 32 17 She is called "incomparably the most exquisite of film stars— beside her Constance Bennett and Joan Crawford seem as if they were cut out of tin !" What do you think? HP! (FiE beauty and gaiety of the new Erich Pommer I film, "The Congress Dances," is a great success here in London, except among the highbrows. They grimly turn a shoulder on it and express preference for gangster films of the grim and ugly sort of which all other cinema-goers have long wearied. Thus we may see how an unbalanced literary diet may stunt the growth of a generation. Aldous Huxley, with that passion for self-analysis and self-censure which leads him to pounce on nearly every human characteristic as if it were a roach, and T. S. Eliot, who is so paralyzed by his anxiety to be distinguished that he is reduced to claiming paralysis as a distinction, have produced a generation which is afraid to make a move, in case it turns out to be derisible and undistinguished. Consequently they rarely commit themselves to the positive act of appreciation except for objects so unlikely to arouse this feeling that they can at first pretend to be relying on an esoteric discrimination and, if pressed, pretend that this appreciation was not genuine and they were merely gratifying an extremely subtle sense of humor. It is gloomy for those who have to do with them ; but in this case they are the losers. For this film is an extremely' jolly thing, which marks the beginning of a phase in which the cinema complies with the ordinary literate person's demand for complexity. There has been practiced up till now in the film an unnatural and highly inartistic concentration. When one goes to see, say, Marlene Dietrich in "Dishonored,"' one's attention is nailed down to the fair Marlene, her legs, her love affairs. But Marlene interests us only because she is part of an interesting world, and has endless derivations from it and relations By Rebecca West Courtesy of The Neiv York American Read what Rebecca West, famous English writer, says about Lilian Harvey, newest screen sensation with it. The emphasis laid on her, presupposes in the audience a greater power of being contented with a single personality than even an adolescent in love ascribes to himself. But in "The Congress Dances" there is an end to that pretense. The producers assume, and arccertainly justified in so doing, that the audience will fall in love with Lilian Harvey, the girl who plays the little Viennese glove maker, who very nearly becomes the mistress of the Czar when he attends the Congress that was called to settle the fate of Xapoleon when he was bottled up in Elba. But they also realize that the audience will have a lot of mind left over from that activity, which will be free to be amused by the pomp and ceremony of the Congress itself, and the superb character of Metternich. the cynical statesman who called the Allies together and tried to diddle them. So they use that material, and send the audience away with a satisfaction far wider than erotic. The film, in fact, has assumed the freedom the novel has always exercised, ^ to be large and roomy and full of all J-', >^r-: sorts of things (Continued on page 89) The English, French, and German leading men of "Congress Dances," with Lilian Harvey, the star. You'll be seeing the English version over here any minute now.