The Film Society

"The Ghost Goes West" was the first film that Rene Clair made outside his native France : if Gallic wit did not make a good Channel crossing, there were some amusing digs—visual ones—at the antics of pre-war American millionaires, and the film, as a whole, was not without French polish : if it appeared at times to be a little slow, its age may well account for that; for it was made about the year 1935, I believe. There were some instances of good "editing", in particular the swift cut to the transatlantic liner with the accompanying music of the ships orchestra was effective—so effective, in fact, that it was only afterwards one realised that one had been looking at the photograph of a model in a tank. "In Which We Serve" was appropriately chosen for the evening of Remembrance Sunday. The story and the script were obviously Coward's : he is a past master in the art of assaulting the emotions and very seldom shows signs of letting sentiment get out of hand : even for a "cold war" audience there were many moments of deep feeling, moments that I remember being even more effective in 1942 when the film was new and the war was still to be won. The technical excellence of the film we must credit to the co-d:rector, David Lean : it is surely not given to one man to be so technically efficient in two media so widely divergent, I insist, as stage and screen. "The Magnet" was a charming and unsensational story filmed by our own Ealing Studios under the direction of Charles Freud; in particular it was a well lit film, and had the incomparable advantage of having had T. E. B. Clarke in charge of its script. The stcry was set on Merseyside—that was a pleasant change. William Fox was brilliant as the boy; but then boys often are astonishingly good as themselves on the screen, and that much under-rated actress, Kay Walsh, was excellent as his mother : Hollywood would have built her up into a second Myrna Loy. "The Champion" is possibly not a vintage Chaplin, but good enough to remind us that we are in the presence of genius : who, save Chaplin, in embarrassment at the applause when he felled his hulking opponent, would have conceived the idea of plaiting his feet along the lower rope of the ring? Or who, save Agag, once the idea was conceived, would have trodden it so delicately?

The last showing of the term was Jacques Tati's "Jour de Fete". Tati, hailed in a first flush of enthusiasm as the French Chaplin, has certainly given us a French film with a d_fferaice : in the first place he took his camera out of doors and kept it there; secondly, he did not give us polish or wit but "slapstick". The film began rather slowly as it depicted the arrival of a fair in a French village, but "stepped up" the pace to a rousing finish as it showed the efforts of the village

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