STATE OF THE CINEMA
Glick, Nathan
State of the Cinema With Tongue in Cheek By NATHAN GLICK HOLLYWOOD'S major contribution to the jollity of the Christmas season is a conventional, but literate and decently ill-willed poke at the...
...The dialogue has an irreverent and venomous touch that is a pleasure to hear come over the customary banal soundtrack...
...The sort of cool effrontery Kind Hearts and Coronets achieves could never be equalled by an American cast: it so obviously requires the carefully nurtured British flair for sensational understatement...
...In the face of the traditions and cultural respectability of the stage, the movie colony has nourished an inferiority complex which all the swimming pools, mink coats, and six-figured salaries in Southern California cannot dissipate...
...Moving between rich bourgeois and moderately unrespectable gentility, Gigi is redolent of Proust's novel, The Remembrance of Things Past, particularly in the film's wealthy old satyr who looks like a cross between Sacha Guitry and Leon Blum, and the stuffy petulant young rogue who conducts his love affairs according to the protocol of the market place...
...III If further proof were needed that a film's style of impudence is a function of national character, there is the wonderful French period piece, Gigi...
...The action takes place at the turn of the century in Paris, and in the course of a promenade, a visit to a restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower, a turn in an ice-skating rink, and a day at the seashore, we are introduced to a world of Cezanne landscapes and Renoir week-end amusements and middle class interiors, to the leisurely, stable, and plushy world of the French Impressionists...
...The publicity for the film has centered around the tour-de-force of NATHAN GLICK, a film and book critic, has contributed periodic reports on the movies to The Progressive during recent years...
...But more centrally wrong is the trivial peg of ambition on which the plot hangs...
...As an aging spellbinder on stage and a holy terror off it, Bette Davis starts out in fine fettle and gets better and more authentic as the film progresses...
...Say it not in Los Angeles, but the irony of Joseph Mankewicz's coiled and high-spirited satire of bluff and bluster behind the footlights is that it derives almost wholly from the stage style of social comedy of Philip Barry, S. N. Behrman, and Noel Coward...
...Obviously only the French could handle, without coyness or prurience, with in fact delicacy of spirit and unself-conscious pleasure, the theme of the professional instruction of a young girl by her doting aunt and grandmother for the career of mistress...
...This said, however, I must add that it is hard to imagine a stage cast doing a better job of acting...
...It seems to me, however, that while Guiness supplies a kind of comic Blimpish solidity as the various stuffy heirs to a legacy, each of whom the hero must murder in turn to advance from ninth to first in line, it is Dennis Price's fastidious, amoral nonchalance as the murderer that makes the film...
...All About Eve might just as well have been a stage play...
...No one in the cast comes near her for pure force and effortless luxury of character detail, though Anne Baxter is probably the most convincing exemplar of female craftiness and treachery you will see in many months, and George Sanders, in his familiar role of devil's advocate, handles his modest lines as if they were the jeweled aphorisms of Oscar Wilde...
...State of the Cinema With Tongue in Cheek By NATHAN GLICK HOLLYWOOD'S major contribution to the jollity of the Christmas season is a conventional, but literate and decently ill-willed poke at the pretensions of the "drah-ma...
...He has also written reviews for Commentary, The Nation, The New York Times, and The New Leader...
...It makes the cinema a little more adult and intelligent, but it is in itself no argument for cinema...
...Despite the theme, the film catches the elusive quality of a girl's innocence in a performance of unusual grace, vitality, and quicksilver charm...
...The film has occasions of intellectual gaucherie, especially in the glib but fatuous use of psychiatric terminology, indicating a lack of touch with contemporay cultural currents which allows the writer to feel bold when he is only out-of-date...
...Alec Guiness (the original psychfo atrist in T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party) who plays eight separate roles, including one of an elderly woman...
...But for all its callous portraiture of the theater's demigods and their feet of neurotic clay...
...Done by one of the traditional playwrights in this style, Mankewicz's comedy might well have been at least as literate and certainly more meaningful than the film is...
...II But if you want the true Wildean flavor of elegant, barbed comedy, you would do better to see the British film, Kind Hearts and Coronets...
...And while closing the film on a gleefully sardonic repetition of the opening cycle gains something of the ghoulish force of a Saki story or a Charles Addams cartoon, it has none of the logical or psychological seriousness that holds a really effective social comedy together...
...All About Eve should give Hollywood egos a respite, and as for the fraternal responsibilities of the season, the film after all only does to Broadway what Broadway has not hesitated in the past to do to Hollywood, from the comic caricature of Once In A Lifetime to Clifford Odets' jeremiad of last year's New York season...
Vol. 15 • January 1951 • No. 1
