"THE LAST CHANCE"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 376, 6 September 1946, Page 32

"THE LAST CHANCE"

| "THE LAST CHANCE," a Swiss film (one of the first they have made) which has been brought here by M-G-M, was previewed by three to four hundred people at the Paramount Theatre, Wellington, on a recent Sunday evening. "The Listener’ was not among those invited. Fortunately we are in a position to turn the other cheek, by printing this very favourable account of the film written by a contributor who did attend the preview: HEIR last chance of survival was to cross the Alps into Switzerland. The little Italian village that they left, what remained of it, was occupied by the Germans. The weather made the Alps apparently impassable; there was no guide; and it was uncertain whether Switzerland would admit this poor group of refugees if they got there at all. What a theme for Hollywood! And how many times they have used it, or themes like it, to show to advantage the photogenic qualities of their most glamorous stars, the fighting qualities of their more masculine actors. The Last Chance could have been just another war film, set in Italy in the early part of 1943 with a British lieutenant and an

American sergeant escaping on their way to a German prisoner-of-war camp. But this is a Swiss film, and for the first time for a long while we are able to see what Continental movie-makers can do. The result is a completely different and far more satisfying approach. To begin with, the characters of the film are some of the most normal and human people we have encountered on the screen, and they are the more real because they speak in their own languages. As there are characters from all over Europe this means that we listen to Englishmen speaking English, Frenchmen, Germans and Italians speaking in French, German and Italian, and frequently trying to make themselves under. stood in alien diction. With abbreviated translations given as sub-titles and the appropriate intonations and gestures, the whole thing is most convincing and not at all hard to follow. * * * HE main character, a British lieutenant, has no outstanding characteristics which would set him apart from thousands of other soldiers. His courage enables him to do just what thousands of others have been doing during the last eight, or even eight hundred, years: he consciously endangers and finally loses his own life in an attempt to help a small group of people against overwhelming odds. Matter-of-fact treatment is given to the flashes of temporary weakness in human nature — the lieutenant, the American sergeant, and an English captain whom they have joined, are tempted to strike for their own freedom and leave the unfortunates to fend for themselves; the spasms of rebellion against the British leaders and. mistrust of them by the refugees when things appear hopeless; the exasperation at the professor who will not leave his heavycase of research papers behind him, and . sO on. Possibly the film is most successful and sensitive in its treatment of savagery, and it is here that the difference between the American and European films most clearly emerges. The director credits his audience with a little imagination and does not force close-ups of brutality on them. It was more powerful to show, not the actual beating-up of the Jewish woman after her attempted suidide, but the American soldier quietly vomiting in revulsion at the sight; the photography of the dead bodies as the result of almost Belsen bestiality is done from a respectful distance. Far from lessening reality, this restraint makes a far greater impression. * ee |? is difficult to describe the atmosphere of tension which the direction is able to create. The characters appear so true: the kindly assistants in the, Italian village, the gallant-hearted Italian Scarlet Pimpernel, the slimy informer. The refugees seem to represent the whole of suffering Europe. It may well be that the happy and hopeful ending-the admission of the group into Switzerland-

is too good to be true; it is questionable whether these people, some of whom had been turned back from: country after country "since 1938; would against -written orders be admitted to this refuge. Possibly the director felt that we had borne enough for the 90 minutes, and that for this group of people fate should show some little consideration. s The courage and hope they express at the last, their faith in their future is shown with that same restraint as is noticeable tgroughout the film. "Not much to look at," says the English captain in the final scene, "just a handful of people"; but it is this handful of people who give an urgency, more vivid than anything I can remember, to the plight of those whom the politicians rather objectively and inhumanly term

"displaced persons."

P.

T.