THE MAGIC BOX

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 667, 18 April 1952, Page 16

THE MAGIC BOX

(Rank) JHAT (I wondered) could even a director like John Boulting do with sixty stars in the British cinema’s big co-op-erative effort for Festival year, well over 10,000 feet long and Technicolored? How pleasant it was, then, to find The Magic Box interesting throughout, enjoyable and-yes, I think a good film. Its appropriate subject is the life of William Friese-Greene, a British pioneer of the cinema. At first a successful photographer, he spent so much unprofitable time on inventions that he died with only the price of a cinema ticket..His first wife had died and his second had left: him, unable to put up with it any longer. That, at any rate, is how Eric Ambler’s script: has it, and I believe it’s factual. The film opens with Friese-Greene (Robert Donat) visiting his wife (Margaret Johnston) and ends with his fatal collapse the same day after an appeal to a cinema industry conference to let the film grow up. Between these points the inventor’s story is told in two cleverly ordered flashbacks-one covering his second wife’s life with him, the other his early years till just before the death. of his first wife (Maria Schell). This means’ that the highlignt of the film, Friese-Greene’s ffirst flickering pictures, his joy and excitement, comes very near the end. The Magic Box moves at a good speed, and the story is interesting in itself and must, I think, have a greater impact if you know it’s true. Robert Donat, in an_ excellent performance, makes Friese-Greene an eager, gentle, likeable character, who doesn’t mean to make things difficult for his familybut does. We feel especially sorry for his second wife, when, to ease the burden, her under-age sons go off to the war-one high price that is paid for the little, man’s ruling passion. The film’s many top-line players are quite as unobtrusive as their roles allow. Blessed, then, with an _ interesting story and players who know when not to be stars, The Magic Box still wouldn’t have come to much without good direction and photography, and a script that is not only cleverly ordered but intelligible. These Mr. Boulting, Jack Cardiff and Mr. Ambler have given it. I know, anyway, that I went along a sceptic and came away with the impression that I had seen a difficult job well done by a team of skilled craftsmen who understood their medium. THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE (M.G.M.) AFRAID on the eve of battle, a youth runs away after his first spell under fire, but returns to distinguish himself. This is the story of The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane’s novel of the Anterican Civil War. The book was written without experience of war and is largely subjective--the youth’s thoughts and feelings are extensively explored. With Audie Murphy as the youth and John Dierkes and Bill Mauldin as

a the tall’ soldier and the loud soldier, John Huston, writer-director, has made what is on the whole a faithful screen translation of the Crane classic. Much of the atmosphere of the story is captured, and with good acting by Audie Murphy and an outside voice occasionally speaking passages from the book, even the youth’s thoughts and feelings are conveyed to a greater extent than I had dared to expect. The rest of the cast give solid support. The photography is excellent (the best of it brilliant), and since much of its power and beauty depends on the dramatic quality of the shots, Mr. Huston is probably entitled to share some of the credit with his photographer, Harold Rosson. Some who know the book will object that here and there cuts in the story in translation make it seem disjointed, and that in other places its development is unsatisfactory; but they will remember the film if only for such powerful sequences as the one which ends-in the tall soldier’s death. Edward Garnett, who admired the book, named war’s malignant, cold ironies, prosaic dreadfulness and dreary, deadening tedium among the factors Crane underestimated, I think this is largely true, too, of the film, and since in a prologue it hints at a "point" in the story in both the youth and the nation reaching maturity through the trials of war, it is a fault-we are entitled to know the worst. The film is perhaps more telling than the book in some of its pictures of war-for example, the fallen soldier half rising to replace his spectacles-but it needs to be, since it is less subjective. There are two interesting changes in the story. The capture of the Confederate colours-is, inexcusably, treated poetically; and at the end, the youth, having proved his physical courage, starts to confess his desertion (in the book he has only troubled thoughts), but is afraid to tell more than half the truth. M.G.M. re-edited this film to give it greater box-office appeal, so it is not pure Huston. Even so, it is a fine piece of work.