MAN ON THE PROWL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 820, 15 April 1955, Page 18

MAN ON THE PROWL

(United Artists) ERE are occasions when filmgoing would be a _ good deal more pleasant if one could pick the audience as well as the picture. The return of Paul Muni, after a decade’s absence | from the screen, was half spoiled for me | because I had to share it with a bunch of louts, teddyboys and _ crypto-adoles-cents. These obtrusive extraverts, reducing every situation to its lowest comic-book denominator, yelped and brayed at all the wrong moments and successfully rubbed the bloom off what could have been a sentimental, if not a memorable, occasion, It might have been better for us all if Man on the Prowl! had been a little less ineptly titled: It might be better in general if films could occasionally be classified "For Middle-aged Audiences Only" -and occasionally would be often enough, since the middle-aged (like the middle class) have scarcely come into their own yet as a pressure-group; or even as consumers worth cultivating. A desire to renew acquaintance with Muni is, I suppose, in itself an indication of advancing years. Perhaps one has to be middle-aged to remember him at all, since the films which established his reputation — The Good Earth, Pasteur, Zola and Juarez-were all made in the thirties. Man on the Prowl, however, lacks both the scope of these earlier productions and the opportunity for picturesque impersonation which they pro-’ vided, and which Muni seized so admirably. It lacks a number of other things, too-the most noticeable of these to me being originality-but at least it tries to say something worth saying about the times we live in and the pressures they exert upon the homeless and the rejected. The film was made in Italy (about two years ago, I suspect), and the background of slums, spotty tenements and sunlit rubble is one that has become familiar to us in the work of Rosselini and de Sica, and their imitators-in films like Paisa, Shoeshine, and Bicycle Thieves. Man on the Prowl is reminiscent of the last of these for its general note of hope-lessness-the impotence of the individual deprived by circumstance of the means to live-and also because the principal figures are a man and a small boy who tags along after him. In this case the small boy, Giacomo, is Vittorio Manunta, who made his first film appearance in Anthony Havelock-Allan’s Never Také No for an Answer. At ten years old he is a little more self-conscious than de Sica’s Enzo Staiola-once or twice you catch him reciting his lines-but his English is remarkably good and he has a small boy’s liveliness and charm. The boy and the man are thrown together by accident. Giacomo loses the few lire his mother has given him and steals a bottle of milk from a dairy. A few moments later Muni, a homeless, hungry and desperate D.P., steals a small cheese from the same shop and accidentally kills the proprietress in. making his getaway. In the confusion which follows, the child. clings like a burr to Muni’s tattered coat-tails, in the belief that the man is trying to protect him from the consequences of his own

‘ petty theft. From here the film is on thoroughly familiar ground. The police surround the bomb-site in which the two fugitives have taken refuge, the buildings are inexorably combed and the action ends on the rooftops. Muni gives a competent, if not an outstanding, performance, in a_ part which demands more from the body than from the voice. He has contrived a shambling gait to convey the hopelessness of the outcast and assumed the furtive glance of the fugitive, and he acts with integrity. I’m sure also that we cannot be reminded too often of the importance~and the relative scarcity-of charity and compassion. But I feel that other films have done so more effectively.