THE PRIVATE AFFAIRS OF A SCOUNDREL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 469, 18 June 1948, Page 33

THE PRIVATE AFFAIRS OF A SCOUNDREL

(M.G

M.)

JRE Private Affairs of a ScoundrelM.G.M.’s idea of what Maupassant might have produced if he had written his novel Bel Ami with one eye on the Johnston Office and the other on the Legion of Decency-seemed to me remarkable mainly for a strenuous and at times misdirected enthusiasm for Art. | The story, which is concerned with the social progress of a thoroughly unprincipled rogue, has some rather dull passages_on the screen (it is, as I have indicated, Maupassant with the fangs drawn) but I was more than once saved from boredom by the work of the art director. He, I finally decided, owed a good deal of his inspiration to the Impressionists, but it was some time before I arrived at that conclusion. Several times I was bothered by the feeling that I was seeing something vaguely familiar and when two of the characters foregathered at the bar of the Folies Bergeres I realised why. The bar, and the girl behind it, were obviously d’aprés Manet. Other filmgoers, who know their Impressionists better than I do, may find it amusing to discover traces of Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec as well*as Manet, but anyone who likes his art confined to the proper period will be somewhat staggered by a surrealist treatment of The Temptation of St. Anthony which suddenly bursts in strident technicolour from a black-and-white screen. The explanation of the technicolour, of course, is that this particular picture (by Max Ernst) cost M.G.M. a good deal in hard currency, and it was presumably considered good business-as in the case of Allbright’s Dorian Gray-to let the cash-customers enjoy the fun too. Ernst’s picture, which was the winning entry in a competition held by the studio as part of the advance bally-hoo for the film (Dali and Stanley Spencer were, I remember, among the unsuccessful competitors), shows the unfortunate saint in process of being eviscerated by a horde of lobster-clawed monstrosities. I can say so only because I saw a reproduction

of the canvas some time ago. The screen reproduction is hardly sharp enough to show much detail, and isn’t kept in the frame long enough, but even at that it is a good deal more shocking than George Sanders is in the part of the scoundrelly M. Duroy. Once or twice there are isolated instances of genuine dramatic tension but as a whole the film is hardly much more than an elaborate and expensive charade. The final sequence introduces us once more to the comfortably well-worn moral that evildoing brings inevitable retribution-and you do not need to be so acute an observer of life as Maupassant to see through that one. Indeed, I think Maupassant, whose qualities as a detached observer of the human comedy are the prime source of his greatness as a novelist and story-teller, is an author singularly unsuited to adaptation as Hollywood understands the term. The late Mark Hellinger was perhaps exaggerating a little when he said, "Hollywood is gutless, You can’t make an honest, forceful picture here." But it isn’t difficult to understand why he said it.