GIVE US THIS DAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 631, 3 August 1951, Page 24

GIVE US THIS DAY

| (Rank) T was a pleasure to see last week two such conscientious and generally well-made films as Give Us This Day, directed by ‘Edward Dmytryk, and Storm Warning, directed by. Stuart Heisler, Both deal intelligently with serious "themes, are technically sound, and work up a lot of tension. Both also | have well-written. scripts, Give Us This Day is a film which comes close to greatness. It is based on the short story (later expanded into a novel), Christ in Concrete, by Pietro di Donato, describing the life and macabre death of an Italian immigrant bricklayer’ in New York. The hero is played*by Sam Wanamaker, and his wife by Lea Padovani. The story is.set in the depression years, and the film makes. a grim indictment of society for the tragedy which befalls the hero, Geremio. Dmytryk, who was the director of Crossfire and Obsession, made it in England, although it is a thoroughly American production for all that. The leading parts are played by Americans and Italians, apart from Kathleen Ryan, who played opposite James Mason in Odd Man Out, and here takes the role of the Other Woman. From its scarifying opening sequence showing the hero wandering home through the dark city streets (photography by Robert Day), to the terrible intensity of its depression scenes, Give Us This Day has an emotional strength which is rare in the cinema. This is as much due to the high standard of acting (especially by the two leading players) and the spare, almost Biblical rhythms of the dialogue, as to the authority with which the director handles his material. The film is couched in the simplest terms. Its characters are unsophisticated to the point of naivety, and speak in a simple, rather stilted English befitting people unfamiliar with the language. The action deals with the most elemental incidents in life-the betrothal, marriage and honeymoon. of Geremio, his love for his wife and family, and their desire for a home of their own, the dignity of labour "and the comradeship of the five is aoe (of whom Geremio is the leader) i their work of bricklaying. "As the film proceeds Geremio develops into a symbolic Christ-like figure. When the workers are starving during the depression he persuades them. to come in with him on a piece of construction work which only he knows is dangerously unsafe. He takes the full responsibility for their lives upon his own conscience and the strain, . after one of them is crippled in an accident, ‘causes his moral breakdown. He consorts with a tart whom he had known before his marriage, bullies his friends on the job, and reaches the point where in shame and despair he impales his hand on the spike of an iron railing outside the block of flats he lives in. ‘He resolves to return to his wife and to tell his friends how he had lied to them about the safety of their work. He does both these things on Good Friday, and shortly afterwards a second acci-

dent. occurs: in which he is buried alive in liquid.concrete. This climax, because of its suddenness and despite its deliberate irony, is the weakest part of the film. The .manner of his death is unbelievable, and I \think it shows a weakness in the structure of the film that it fails to prepare the audience sufficiently for such an ironic, horrifying end.