BEWARE OF PITY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 413, 23 May 1947, Page 30

BEWARE OF PITY

(Two Cities)

‘THIs is a type of film for which one can feel considerable admiration but not much warm. affection. It is competent and intelligent, es-

pecially on the acting side, but, in spite of dealing with highly emotional matevial, the general effect is rather cold, depressing, and morbid. It certainly didn’t succeed in arousing in me the feelings of sympathy for the leading characters which I feel sure it was the director's intention to arouse. And that wasn’t because I was taking literally the film’s injunction to beware of pity. This J. Arthur Rank production is based on the novel by Stefan Zweig. It is set in Central Europe on the eve of the 1914-18 war, but probably in an effort to engage the attention of to-day’s audiences the director has fitted it out with a modern prologue and epilogue in which the hero, a middle-aged veteran, is shown recounting his own 30-year-old romance for the guidance of a young airman of World War II. who is in much the same sort of emotional predicament as that in which the hero once found himself. This flash-back technique is becoming a bit hackneyed now: if a story is worth »telling it should be worth telling straight, without wrapping it up as an improving parable. And the attempt to gain immediacy in this case is, I think, largely responsible for the film’s failure to catch our sympathy, since paradoxically the effect is to make the main narrative seem remote. It is, after all, hard to feel sorry about something which, you have just been reminded, happened three decades ‘ago. In those days, we are told, the hero (Albert Levien), was a young Czech cavalry-officer who met and took pity on a beautiful but crippled baroness (Lilli Palmer) living in the castle near the village where his regiment was garrisoned. He gave her a great deal of his time and attention, and she mistook his pity for love. When she discovered her mistake she pushed herself over the parapet and killed herself. There’s a bit more to the plot than that, but not much, which means that in place of incident we get plenty of conversation. Hero and heroine spend most of the time discussing their emotions with one another, or with her father, or his fellow-officers, or the family doctor and the doctor’s wife. The doctor, particularly, is full of philosophy and good advice on the need to distinguish between the ordinary kind of pity and the superior kind, which is compassion. The philosophising is maybe a little woolly, but the talk is mostly educated talk and worth listening to; the costumes were designed by Cecil Beaton and are worth seeing; the settings have an antique charm (30 years ago is a long time in European history); and the acting is nearly all worth watching. I don’t think that either Lilli Palmer or Albert Levien quite succeed in bringing the hero and heroine to life, especially those» Palmer, , who has an exceedingly difficult role to play as the frustrated, sensitive invalid. More but I admire their endeavours, =

successfully defined, perhaps because less complex, are the characters of. the doctor and his blind wife (played by Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Gladys Cooper). But I think that Ernest Thesiger overplays his part as the desperately. unhappy father of the crippled girl: at any rate, far from making me feel sorry for the old man, he mostly made me feel impatient.