I'LL WALK BESIDE YOU

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 302, 6 April 1945, Page 17

I'LL WALK BESIDE YOU

(BEF)

HE heading of my column this week refers not to the quality of the films reviewed, but to the moral stature of the people in them. They

offer an interesting contrast. Those in the British film I'll] Walk Beside You are wholly nice people; nice, kind people, conscientious, warm-hearted, and selfsacrificing, whom you could suitably recommend to the notice of your children and neighbours as types to emulate (and might even do worse than copy yourself). Those in the American film, on the other hand, are aggressive, acquisitive, violent, or downright criminal. The nearest approach to a redeeming motive in the character who plays the hero’s part (that of a private detective) in The Maltese Falcon is that he wants revenge on the gangsters who killed his partner, not because he particularly liked his partner (he had in fact been conducting a love affair with the fellow’s wife behind his beck!), but just because the murdered man was his partner and to leave him unrevenged would presumably be contrary to business ethics. As for the other characters in the story they were, I imagine, only acceptable to the Hays Office because they all come to a bad end. The nationality of these two particular films is, of course, purely coincidence. You are just as likely, on other occasions, to find bad characters in British films’ as in American ones; and, conversely, many a Hollywood production contains’ characters who glow with sweetness and light. But granted that the cinema has some social pyrpose and influence, the general question does arise as to which type of film best serves that purpose: one which shows human nature at its most admirable, or one which shows it in a less agreeable mood. One school of thought would, indeed, argue that it is always the quality of the. human material that is most important: that if a man is intrinsically a good man it doesn’t matter whether he is a Tory or a Socialist, an Italian or an Eskimo. Thus, what really counted in Colonel Blimp, for instance, was that both the leading characters were naturally good men, not that one was a Blimp and the other a Junker. As against this there is the argument that a man i largely what he believes; that it is impossible to separate character from conviction. The trouble, dramatically, is that human nature being what it is; bad people are usually more interesting than good ones. Angels are not merely unreal: they are too often wishy-washy. At any rate, it seems to require much greater skill in a book, play, or film, to hold the interest with a wholly good character than with one who is spectacularly wicked. My own view is in the direction of compromise. I believe that the. main function of the cinema, as of any other art, is to present truth; so that while it would certainly be an anti-social move if vice were consistently depicted on the screen as alluring and glamorous, it would be equally wrong and misleading if virtue were over-emphasised.

NYWAY, if you are in a mood for virtue, and enjoy simple pleasures, I can recommend I'll Walk Beside You. It would be easy enough to be cynical about this picture, because it has so plainly set out to tug at all the available heart-strings, with a naive little romance about a sailor who loses his memory and doesn’t recognise the girl who has. waited so faithfully for him, with a collection of English rural types for comedy and local colour (including good old Percy Marmont as a country parson), and with enough sentimental music for a ZB Request Session. The pace is pedestrian (but then, it’s I'll Walk, not Run, Beside You), and) the production, direction, and acting are a bit ragged at the edges. In fact, this is a "typically British" picture; by which I mean, in the cinema sense, that it is completely lacking in the slickness and sophistication which characterise such a typical Hollywood production as The Maltese Falcon. Yet; for ali that, there is something very endearing, very warmhearted, and very worthwhile about 71] Walk Beside You. Rather curiously, perhaps, it reminded me strongly of a Russian film called A Musical Story: mainly I think because the heroine (Lesley Brook) is such a genuine and natural type, as little like the. usual screen glamour girl as the hero (Richard Bird) is like the conventional screen hero, and also because such effective use is made of homely comedy and sentiment.