TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 9, 25 August 1939, Page 33

TO SEE OR NOT TO SEE?

THE CHEAT (unity-A. & N.Z.) After a surfeit of Hollywood concoctions dedicated to the theory that crime does not pay, I found "The Cheat" as welcome as a savoury after a diet of cake. It is highly seasoned French farce, spiced with typically Gallic wit. This film does not merely hint that there may be occasions on which virtue fails to triumph; it actually has the effrontery to base its whole story on the proposition that dishonesty is the best policy! The career of the Cheat starts when, as a little boy, he steals a few pennies to buy marbles. That night his family all have mushrooms for tea, but he, for punishment, is forbidden to have any. The mushrooms are poisonous. The family dies. The little boy lives to wonder how it is possible to mourn eleven people adequately all at once (the family was a large one). He arrives at a conclusion which, if regrettable, is at least logicalthat it is better to be slightly dishonest than quite dead. As the little boy grows up he sees no reason to alter his conviction that dishonesty has its advantages. If he cheats at cards, he wins. As soon as he plays honestly, he loses. The beautiful women he meets turn out to be crooks. In the end he becomes an honest man through no fault of his own. We leave him penniless-and regretful. If "The Cheat" is different in theme it is revolutionary in technique. You realise this from the opening scene when, instead of the usual dull list of credit titles, the cameramen, set-designers, and cast, are informally introduced by Sacha Guitry, who himself performs the multiple functions of author, director, producer, and star of the picture. Guitry’s method of narration is just as intimate and delightful. The story of the cheat is told by the cheat himself, in a kind of running commentary. Except it. a few scenes the characters do not speak. It is as if someone with a sly wit and a sardonic sense of humour were turning over the pages of an old photograph album and commenting on the pictures, "The Cheat," it seems hardly necessary to add, was made in France: but in this version the speech has been done into English by a very satisfactory new "dubbing" process. The form is the the form of Guitry, but the: voice is the

voice of Norman Shelley, of the BBC, And it is an admirable voice. as urbane as everything else in this most original and diverting entertainment. FIVE CAME BACK (RKO Radio) This film employs what I usually describe as "the Grand Hotel technique," though I understand that James Barrie got in first with it in "The Admirable Crichton." This technique requires that an assortment of characters should be brought together in. a_ confined space and under unusual conditions and’ allowed to react on one another. If it isn’t an hotel or a desert island it’s a train, a submarine, a liner, a trans-Continental bus, or, most often, an aeroplane. But if Director John Villiers Farrow showed little originality in selecting an air-liner which crashes in the Amazonian jungle, as the mainspring of "Five Came Back," he showed a great deal of it in his treatment of the subject. Thanks to his handling, this film is well worth seeing. Aboard the air-liner are two pilots, a shady but lovely lady, an eloping couple, a gangster’s small son in charge of one of his father’s henchmen, an old professor and his wife, and a South American revolutionary returning, in the charge of a detective, to have his neck stretched for shooting his country’s Minister of War. When the plane comes to grief in a tropical storm and alights in headhunters’ territory near the source of the Amazon, this ill-assorted band must work together or perish. By the special alchemy of the cinema the situation works a magical transformation in all the characters. The lovely lady remains lovely but becomes less shady; the old professor and his wife become young again; the gunman dies like a hero; the rich young man is revealed as a drunken weakling; and the murderous revolutionary turns out to be the best citizen among them. When the war-drums beat menacingly he takes control; and when it is discovered that the patched up plane can carry only five passengers, he "plays God" by deciding which five have the most right to live. He-is not among them. "Five Came Back" has no big stars but a competent second-rank cast, which includes, as a welcome change, C. Aubrey Smith out of his familiar role of Empirebuilder. He’s the professor, Though a little more money might have prevented the Amazonian jungle looking so patently Hollywooden, "Five Came Back" is another. demonstration that ideas count more than colossal expenditure, even in film production.

G.

M.