THE FAKE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 791, 17 September 1954, Page 17

THE FAKE

(United Artists-Pax Films) O be more accurate, it’s something to do with spring holidays. From’ the reviewer's point of view nothing so closely approaches absolute vacuum as vacation time in Wellington. Perhaps there have been term holidays when good new films have made an appearance, but, looking back over my shoulder with a jaundiced eye, it doesn’t seem to have happened often. Instead, it’s jolly old shoppers’ sessions, with Mum and Dad and the kids tramping cheerfully across one’s corns; choc-bombs exploding to left, corn popping on the right-and more corn flickering from the screen. It’s Tarzan, and Red Skelton, Errol Flynn and the Marx Brothers, and Charlie himself in an umpteenth holiday season. By the end of the second week it looked as if we had come hard up against the bottom of the barrel. However, The Fake-a modest shoestring thriller that could easily have been passed over had the fields been whiter to the harvestproved to have enough intelligence and enough originality to keep faith (not to mention hope and charity) alive until school reopened again. The Fake is the story of a loan collection of old masters sent from the United States to the Tate Gallery in London for a special exhibition, and as the film begins the cased canvasses are being unloaded by night at the London docks. Before you can say Diego Rodriguez de Silva y -Velasquez-before I could say it, anyway-a covey of wide boys has snatched one of the packing-cases, dumped it in a strategically-parked van, and-roared off into the smog. They get clean away, too, largely because Dennis O’Keefe, the U.S. special agent travelling with the pictures, collides somewhat violently with his opposite number from the Tate (Guy Middleton), Whether the collision represents collusion, too, is just one of a number of niggling little questions which the story leaves unanswered almost to the last moment, but for the time being all is well. Instead of hijack; ing the crown jewel of the collection-a Madonna and Child by Leonardo-the thieves make off with an empty package, Mr. O’Keefé having been astute enough to stow the canvas in the Captain’s safe.

At the Tate he hands it over in person to the director and the representative of the Trustees-the latter an ultracivilised patron of the arts, played by Hugh Williams-and thoroughly annoys both by quizzing them sharply on the Tate’s defences, I sympathised with the Englishmen. Considering the fuss Mr, O’Keefe made he might have been handing over the H-bomb formula, But the Gallery’s burglar-alarms and nightwatchmen are not enough. The Leonardo disappears-not, you might say, suddenly; it simply fades away, leaving instead an accomplished forgery. From here the mystery begins to take more definite shape, and the appearance of John Laurie, as a frustrated painter and superb copyist, suggests that the yarn may owe something to the van Meegeren case of 1945, But though you may spot the villain before he is un-masked-and you will if you are (like Bentley) a "connosser" — you can’t be quite sure until a satisfactorily late stage in the proceedings. The Fake is, unashamedly, a lowbudget effort, and it leaves some questions unanswered, but (with the exception of brash Mr, O’Keefe) it is smoothly played, and attention has been paid to detail. Even the theme-music, it is claimed, is based on Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. It is, of course, ‘not the original Moussorgsky.