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Comedy of Money, also its shadow, "catastrofe, catastrofe!" The bank messenger (Herman Bouber) has held his post for two and a half decades, his brother-in-law (Matthieu van Eysden) is in "the dog trade" (he sells his pooch to wealthy folks before whistling him back), they could be Lionel Barrymore and James Cagney in a Capra fable. (American Madness is acknowledged, so is Wyler's Counsellor at Law.) The money bag has a hole in it, the old man is fired and bills pile up for him and his daughter (Rini Otte). Amid the rhyming rhythms is the crisscrossing between his suicide attempt at home and a corrupt board meeting seeking a patsy, suddenly the bank has a new director. "It's simply a matter of knowing when to say yes and when to say no," declares the top-hatted clown operating the Brechtian machinery. Max Ophüls on the Great Depression, up and down the corporate elevator, round and round the fancy office. Capital is something lost at the bottom of the sewer, the system is the company president (Cor Ruys) whose monocled eye looms in close-up. (Furthermore, "a good servant is like a bad radio. It's turned on to be silent.") The screen briefly becomes a dusty windshield polished for the pretty maiden behind it, the wandering camera that locates the amorous couple in the woods is parallel with Partie de campagne. No good deed goes unpunished, the returned fortune makes for a case of fraud until the narrator comes to the rescue by pausing and examining the celluloid, cf. La Ronde. "An educational film," with just the impossible happy ending the climate deserves. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |