World Film News and Television Progress (Apr 1936-Mar 1937)

Foreign Films for the Coining Season By MAREE SETON Inferior qiialitr of continental productions may set programme problem It is becoming increasingly difficult for the Film Societies to lind new foreign films of any intrinsic value, since the general tendency of the continental film is to imitate Hollywood. Light comedies and operettas are taking precedence over the production of serious story films and documentaries. Well acted melodramas and 'romantic' films of primitive peoples are replacing what was once the avant-garde movement. The following list, compiled at random from the output of different continental studios, represents to a considerable extent the foreign films, available for Film Societies. Allotriu is a Tobis-Europa picture directed by Willy Forst and featuring Renate Muller, Jenny Jugo, Adolf Wohlbruch (hero of Masquerade) and Heinz Huhniann. who is a delightful comedian. Here is a sophisticated bedroom comedy of the change partners school, which though it is well acted and photographed, is nothing like as good entertainment as Forst's earlier pictures made in Vienna. AUotria has greatly disappointed Paris. Boccaccio, Ufa-Tonfilm with Willy Fritsch, is an expensive, gaudy, but not altogether unamusing operetta in the Vagabond King class. Though it has put Herbert Maisch into the forefront of German directors such a picture cannot be given the consideration of Film Societies, nor can it have any appeal to the average English audience since this kind of thing is better done by Paramount and GaumontBritish. Another Ufa-Tonfilm to be made by a new director, Detlef Sierk, is The Lost Chord. Given a credible script Sierk may some day make a good film ; as it is he has made the very best of bad material. His cast, which includes Lil Dagover, Theodor Loos, Willy Birgel, Maria Koppenhofer, the child actor Peter Bosse and a young Hungarian actress, Maria von Tasnady, who has a lovely and most unusual face, also do the best that they can. With the exception of Willy Birgel, who is hopelessly miscast as the musician-hero (he is the perfectly tailored villain type), they succeed in making a melodramatic and most improbable story of mother-love, adoption and musical genius almost believable. The best thing in the film is Maria Koppenhofer's superb performance as the perverted and vindictive maid. Acting also plays a very important part in the success of Traiimuliis, the picture directed by Carl Froelich, which won the 1936 German Government film prize. Though Froelich is in no way furthering film technique, he is preserving the traditions of good German cinema in the midst of an industry organised since the advent of National-Socialism. Traiimuhis is by no means a great film, but it is sincere and has a genuine feeling of the period which it presents : post-war provincial Germany. The film presents (and in a mild way debunks) the old German morality and the liberal humanism of the leading character. Professor Niemeyer (played by Jannings), head master of the royal grammar-school. It is prob 42 From "Head Hunters of Borneo" ably as much for this reason as for artistic merits that Froelich was given the government prize; while for his performance Jannings received a silver-framed portrait of Adolf Hitler with his hand-written dedication. Traiimuhis is a diflScult film for foreigners to appreciate since the story is so extremely national, though the treatment of it is not particularly nationalistic. As a document of nationalistic psychology, Leni Riefenstahl's picture of the NationalSocialist Party Congress at Nuremburg. entitled Triumph of Will, is a most remarkable and historically valuable film. Nothing like it has ever been made before for it presumes to portray a living political leader almost in the guise of a god. This is the sort of film Alexander theGreat would have had made had the cinema existed when he conquered Egypt and discovered that he was one of the gods. Actually it is a pity for students of history that the cinema was such a late invention, for many 'great' men would then have got their rightful deserts at the hands of posterity. The outsider can only regard Triumph of yVill with interested curiosity. Possibly it might convince some people of the triumph of personality, but not of the actual value of a political system because it does not show how the system works. Triumph of Will is not important as a contribution to cinema, but as a visual and oral record of Hitler and his effect on the mass it is almost indispensable to a study of the man. Though it shows Hitler only through the eyes of passionate disciples, it reveals the whole man, for the camera detects many things which are true even when it is being employed by people dominated by ulterior motives. Perhaps Hitler wishes to be something more than a man, but in reality he is the man-in-the-street magnified a hundredfold, and in that lies his success with the crowd. He is a projection of themselves, and though he can marshal them into battalions, he could not exist independently of them for a single day. The complete contrast to Triumph of IVill, which is a film of political ritual, is the Czech film Earth is Singing, directed by Kolda and photographed by Professor Plicka who is an authority on folk lore. Here is a 'documentary' which shows the ritual and festivals of old gods of pagan origin who now masquerade in Christian disguises in Czechoslovakia. The manner in which it depicts both the work of the peasants and their strange wild dances and celebrations is extraordinarily beautiful, and it reminds one of Dovzhenko's Earth. Earth is Singing is everything a folk film ought to be; while the Tampico-Film unit of Tobis Rota were just the wrong people to go to Borneo and make a film about the headhunters. The expedition was under the direction of Baron von Plessen, but however much Baron von Plessen may ha\e studied the natives of Borneo he does not understand them, for he quite suddenly grafts on to them the moral inhibitions of central Europe. Head Hunters of Borneo is in the Flaherty tradition, only von Plessen lacks Flaherty's epic conception of man's struggle against nature. He also fails to appreciate primitive people — to him they are merely interesting exponents of mumbo-jumbo. A love story of a European character runs through the film which shows the most savage rituals of the wild men of Borneo ; but this love becomes entangled in sentiments and emotions which could never develop in the jungle which the film depicts. The photography is extremely good, and the native actors are excellent until they have to portray emotions which do not at all agree with their natures. The Emperor of California is another German film which deals with the wilds. It is directed by Luis Trenker who also plays the leading part, the historical figure General Suter. This is the de luxe western on which more than a million marks has been spent, and though there are good sequences in it, on the whole it is very uneven. From the cutting and also from a synopsis of the story it appears that Trenker shot far too much film and then did not know what to do with it. In the first sequence — Suter leaving Germany for California — the continuity is poor, and the editing very old fashioned. But later when Suter is cultivating his land in California, fighting against the gold rush and endeavouring to defeat his enemies, the film becomes fairly exciting, well acted and the camera work is good, particularly in the mirage sequence in the desert. But again at the end the whole story is lost in fade-ins and fade-outs, and no one, unless they had seen the White House at Washington, would know where Suter is breathing his last. i