World Film and Television Progress (1938)

BE VIEW OF REVIEWS The Adventures of Tom So truer (Norman Taurog — Selznick International.) Tommy Kelly, Ann Gillis, Jackie Moran. This should have been called Children in ( 'olour. Such a cavalcade of infancy in bloom, complete down to the last freckle, has not been seen on the screen before. The weakness of David Selznick's very beautiful and painstaking adaptation of the Mark Twain classic is that it has been treated a little too reverentially. Situations are laboured, the humour creaks and the "love affairs" of the children are a trifle too precocious. Nothing rings true. Fortunately, there is a long and superb thrill when Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher are lost in a vast cave, stuffed with all the resources of Technicolor and echoing with eerie sound. This scene is one of the finest technical achievements in screen history. Tommy Kelly is a most attractive little boy. Ann Gillis is his plump and promising partner. David Holt makes a good job of Tom's priggish half-brother, Sid. There should have been more of Jackie Moran as Huckleberry Finn. May Robson is admirable as Aunt Polly, especially in her repressed emotions, and the Mississippi is magnificent, though one sees too little of it. Final opinion is that this day and age have lost touch with Mark Twain, but that is neither his fault nor that of Norman Taurog, who directed the film. — G. A. Atkinson, The Sunday Referee The two children. Tommy Kelly and Ann Gillis, bear upon their slim shoulders the weight of the latest film of Mark Twain's story. They perform with a freshness that has nothing to do with the expert behaviour of the usual actors from stage nurseries, are funny and teary and frightened and heroic, and altogether very much the Mark Twain children. Norman Taurog officially directed them, but one guesses he must almost have been sensible enough to let them direct him and that he took their word for what they ought to do in this predicament and that. Especially does the film triumph in its scenes of poignance and of terror, in those of out-andout panic, as in the final cave scenes, for instance ; and I don't think the followers of our country's master humorist will be surprised or chagrined to find The Adventures of Tom Sawyer primarily not a funny picture. Brother Sid Sawyer gets a tomato or a shortcake smack in the face, which is familiar Sennett fare, but also, I suspect, good old-fashioned Missouri. Injun Joe, too, is allowed a bit of knife-throwing in the melo style, which is a bit beyond the borders of the general idea. But I suppose these bits are just put in to amuse youngsters in the audience. That the whole thing is washed in Technicolor didn't bother me except for a lurid sunset or two. Children can stand the dyes, I guess, or perhaps, as times goes on, I am becoming acclimated to Technicolor myself. — John Mosher, The New Yorker 128 Edited by H. E. BLYTH W.F.N. Selection A Slight Case o f Murder * * * Blockade * Owd Bob * Other Films covered iti this issue: Break the News Test Pilot The Adventures of Tom Sawyer The Challenge We're Going to be Rich The Girl of the Golden If est Sailing Along Jezebel J' Accuse L" Equipage _ The VhuUenue (Milton Rosmer— G.F.D.) Luis Trenker, Robert Douglas. The ascent of the Matterhorn by Edward Whymper and his party in 1864 was sufficiently dramatic in all its attendant circumstances, and when these have been touched up — the film explicitly claims the usual licence to be inaccurate in detail — there is certainly enough material for a plot. There is the rivalry with the Italian party, Whymper's extraordinary decision to climb the mountain from what seemed an impossible side, the appalling disaster after the peak had been won, and, finally, the suspicion that Whymper had cut the rope to free himself. But everything is very properly subordinate to the actual climb, which is represented with startling realism and most skilfully prolonged suspense. The photography is magnificent, and a hundred ingenious devices are used to make the spectator feel himself at one with climbers, giddy when they contemplate the abysses below them, and helpless when they slip. The climb is, in fact, so extremely well done that the episode with which the film ends, when Whymper is almost lynched by angry villagers and in the nick of time proved innocent of cutting the rope, seems uncommonly tame, even though everything is done to make it dramatic, and even melodramatic. — The Times There are passages in this wonderfully contrived picture which have a shuddering actuality. The point of the story of Whymper's conquest of the Matterhorn, as it is told here, is a guide's heroism in undertaking a lone climb to bring back the ends of a rope and thus prove (though he meant otherwise) that it broke through fraying instead of being cut by the great mountaineer to save his own skin. Four men were killed through the breaking of the rope and the scene in which their bodies go hurtling through thousands of feet, bouncing upon rocks during the fall, is so terrifying that one needs the hasty reflection that, whatever happened in the disaster of seventy years ago, here they are dummies. But the climbing sequences we see were performed on the mountain itself. There is no hint of deception or fake about them. One shivers responsively at the contemplation of these hazards. The actors concerned seem to be taking the chances that were taken by the characters in the story. —A. T. Borthwick, The News Chronicle Test Pilot (Victor Fleming — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.) Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Myrna Loy. One of the most thrilling pictures I have ever seen, and one of the finest technical achievements of the screen, is Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's Test Pilot. Clark Gable plays the pilot. I think it is the finest performance of his career. He is tough, yet moving in the intensity of his performance. With him is Spencer Tracy, as his mechanic, a big-hearted, rough, kindly, fatalistic fellow who can take everything as it comes till his pilot really falls in love with a girl who knows that she has entered a life that is a magnificent lunacy that must end in a mental breakdown or widowhood at any moment. The girl's brave realisation almost breaks him down till finally, when he is dying after an accident, he whispers, "This is a break for me. Now I shall never