World Film and Television Progress (1938)

way with me, and that when it comes to a star, even Miss Jessie Matthews, tapdancing all the way round a Thames barge on which she is supposed to be working, I have had enough long before she has made a complete round of the boat-deck. This barge, we are told, is conveying bricks from Brightlingsea to Reading; it need hardly be said that there is not a glimmer of a brick, even if one had wanted to see a brick. Mr. Young is always excellent as the distinguished millionaire, who eats his heart out while the young couple are enjoying themselves, and Mr. Whiting and Miss Matthews are supremely good at enjoying themselves. When they do dance you wish them a wave o' the Thames at Maidenhead. . . . But no more o' that. — James Agate, The Taller Miss Matthews sings and dances expertly and is the victim of an inept screenplay that concerns her history from barge girl to musical comedy queen. The picture is a series of monotonous, thinly motivated arguments that get nowhere. Danger. — Stage (William Wyler — Warner Brothers.) Bette Davis, George Brent, Henry Fonda. Without the current fashion for Gone \\ 'ith The Wind, this might not be reckoned as very much of a story. It is the biography of a spoilt New Orleans minx who jilts the men and shocks the ladies way back in the days when crinolines were crinolines. It is a handsome period piece, adroitly done to catch the present fancy, but Miss Davis is its centre. This bland wisp of steel, who began her screen career as the good girl in a film called Bad Girl, is more efficient than all the oldtime vamps in her powers of conveying evil. When her frank eyes look full at you and lie, she is dangerous. When she smiles, she is secret and terrifying. Everything she does is cool, measured, with the hint of a keen business brain behind it. I recommend Jezebel as the virtuoso performance of a very remarkable young woman, whose incarnadinations are seldom too bad to be true. — C. A. Lejeune, The Sunday Observer Critical Summary. In 1936 Bette Davis won the Motion Picture Academy's Award for her acting in "Dangerous", but if this award does not nowadays carry any great weight with the knowledgeable — in this case the Academy were just a year too late, since her best performance was undoubtedly in "Of Human Bondage" — her success in this field does indicate her general recognition as an emotional actress of marked ability. It has been said that the brothers Warner, with masterly foresight, have forestalled David O. Selznick and "Gone With The Wind" by producing "Jezebel", a story which strongly resembles Miss Margaret Mitchell's novel. Indeed it was even suggested that Selznick should take over the "Jezebel" cast in toto, since such few changes were necessary, a suggestion to which the maestro is said to have somewhat acidly replied "I would accept the offer if I, too, were going to make a B picture". " Seldom too bad to be true ..." *J9Accuse (Abel Gance — French.) Victor Francen. A war film of a very different type is J'Accuse, founded upon Hans Chlumberg's Miracle at Verdun, the play done by Ronald Adam at the Embassy some little while ago. Dead soldiers rise from their graves to find themselves flouted and rejected by the living. When the miracle happens the pacifist is burnt. Every reaction to this extraordinary film must be personal and individual. There is no denying its force, its poignant and moving arraignment of war. And if you are in the mood to be shocked and horrified by the hurricane of battle, the ghastliness of modern warfare, this is your film. Directed by Abel Gance, with an unswerving fidelity to actuality, it still cannot avoid the element of triangular passion and the love of a soldier for another soldier's wife. — Sydney W. Carroll, The Sunday Times J' Accuse is an anti-war demonstration of phenomenal force and persuasion, made by Abel Gance on the bones of his silent film of the same name — a film which no picturegoer of the early 'twenties can ever quite get out of his system. Using as actors the war veterans of 19141918, men who carry their scars like banners, it shows the dead of the last war rising from their graves to protest against the threat of a new mobilisation. There is no panache left for warfare when Gance has done with it. The film is ugly and brutal; emphatically not a film for people who are readily haunted. But as a contemporary document in celluloid, directed to the war-talkers and the war-mongers of every nation, I can recommend it as something incomparably valiant and true. — C. A. Lejeune, The Sunday Observer L "Kquipttfji* (Anatole Litvak — French.) Annabella, Charles Vanel, Jean-Pierre Aumont. 1 have little or no taste for war pictures. They seldom either interest or thrill me. The best of them invariably arouse in my nature a sense of revolt that commercial value can attach to the reproduction on the screen of man's most destructive instincts. 1 dislike intensely the idea of men blowing each other to bits. Still more do I detest the notion of men, women and children paying money at cinema box offices to see moving photographs of battles individual or collective. If such pictures must be shown they should be exhibited free of cost and as a national warning. And apart from the film exploitation of wholesale and legalised national murder, the makers of war films can seldom resist bringing into their narratives passionate love stories and sentimental human conflicts utterly at variance with the main theme of slaughter. They do this presumably to soften the blows, to alleviate the horrors, but with the result that they almost always tend to aggravate them and make them more terrifying and hideous. We cannot bar war pictures from our studios, but we can at least refrain from romanticising warriors or picturing international strife as a background for triangular sex struggles. The French have no such scruples. For them love in one form or another is inseparable from other symptoms of human madness. And in U Equipage, a French film, superb of its kind, the greatest and most frightful war man has ever indulged in becomes merely a complement to a threecornered love story. We have the usual fatally fascinating young woman making the acquaintance by Christian name only of the usual handsome young lieutenant and falling hopelessly in love with him, and the subsequent discovery by the lieutenant that she is the wife of his best friend, a partner in the "equipage" he has formed at the front. The three French people in this drama consequently, instead of concentrating upon the job of war, break their respective hearts disentangling themselves, and only the gallant death of the lieutenant in aerial fighting ends the intrigue. Anatole Litvak, husband of Miriam Hopkins, directed, and his arrangement of the many combats that take place in the air has been brilliantly successful. In the hour and forty minutes of the film there is an enormous amount of sky fighting, and there are some astonishingly beautiful cloud effects. This is the picture that was taken up by the Americans and converted into The Woman Between; in it starred Paul Muni, Miriam Hopkins and Louis Hayward. U Equipage is a more sincere and affecting film, although in comparison with Muni Charles Vanel makes a less interesting husband. The part of the wife as taken by Annabella is statuesquely unsympathetic but much more real than when played by Miriam Hopkins; whilst the strength of the triangle rests mainly upon a moving and convincing performance of the lieutenant by Jean-Pierre Aumont. — Sydney W. Carroll, The Sunday Times 131