|
After the trenches (Journey's End), James Whale's brief homefront encounter. "Just a wartime acquaintance." From the balcony to the music-hall stage in one descending crane shot, a Fellini view of show people as chorine after chorine cheers for the camera, one (Mae Clarke) stifles a yawn between hoorays. Tough times for an American actress in London, she takes to the streets and meets the Canadian soldier (Douglass Montgomery) during an air raid. (Searching lights and explosions in the distance give the image an oneiric element.) Love blossoms during a visit to her flat, tea and cigarettes and a woman's growing hope and fear that she's not as jaded as she thought. The lens becomes her mirror as she puts on her uniform (cloche hat, lipstick, perfume, white mink), the neighbor (Doris Lloyd) scampers over for a visit in a pinch of Renoirian deep-focus, damp bloomers on a clothesline fill the screen before the fade to a ritzy mansion. "What do you think this is, the Garden of Eden?" Before LeRoy's plush version, Whale is particularly attentive to the grit of outsiders in Robert E. Sherwood's play. The demimondaine and her gal-pal are tough and vivid, meanwhile the soldier's aristocratic clan includes a Colonel Blimp stepfather and a mother (Enid Bennett) who wraps cruelty in genteel cotton. The vegetables that won't stay in their basket and the knitted sock that comes undone, a rare chance to see Clarke rival Stanwyck or Blondell in hard-boiled vulnerability. Annihilating romance to the very end, the high angle is not cupid's but a dirigible's. "I'd rather they throw bombs on me than take no notice of me at all." (Cf. Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun.) With Ethel Griffies, Frederick Kerr, and Bette Davis. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |