The Magnificent Amber sons was due to screen at a first run theatre in Wellington at Christmas. It was delayed because Amalgamated Theatres considered that there would be no audience for such a dull and tedious film. Journey into Fear was not even given any advance billing; it Just appeared. And so both films, not very new Orson Welles productions, were screened to somewhat goggle-eyed audiences at a third-run bughouse.

What happened to these two films, and to Citizen Kane, and Our Town, and The Long Voyage Home, and Tobacco Road? All these have been high grade productions of an experimental type. I suppose they are too good for movie audiences. A correspondent of the Listener suggested that Gordon Mirams, the Listener critic, is slowly improving the taste and discrimination of New Zealand moviegoers with his intelligent film reviews. Well, much as I admire G.M. as a critic, I feel that even he can't raise the standard. It is sunk deep in the B-grade films and bogged there.

True Art?

The Welles films are examples of true cinema art. I don't pretend for a moment that I understood the implications of Journey into Fear—it was a difficult film—and consequently I thought that The Magnificent Ambersons was slightly the better film. Each, of course, depended strongly upon atmosphere, and got it over, too. As in Kane, the story was subordinate to the acting, and the acting, by the Mercury Players, superb. Welles himself appeared in Journey into Fear, playing a dipsomaniacal, cunning, Turkish police chief. Incidentally, the story concerns the endeavours of the Turkish Government to get an American munitions man out of the country without assassination by Fascist agents—seems rather lacking in point at the moment.

The Magnificent Ambersons, a strong psychological drama, is in very different vein. The story is the old one about the woman who has to choose between son and lover, but it certainly is not trite. The technique, again, is that of atmosphere; some of the individual frames in the early part of the film might have come straight from your grandma's photograph album.

The Welles Technique

In both films all the old Kane tricks are tried out again, with just as much success. There are the odd camera angles—a most remarkable shot comes to mind of Joseph Cotten leaving a tramp steamer at a Russian port; there are the curious facial shots, and of course the idea—and only Welles seems to have thought of it—of having both back-and foreground in focus at the same time; and the extraordinary dialogue (for films) in which people pause, and cut in, and overlap as we do in ordinary life. The speech in a Welles film is vital and alive.

Perhaps the main feature in these Mercury films is that all the characters are exactly right, down to the briefest appearance. [unclear: obeusly] good [unclear: ctors], those who are interested in acting as an art, will play in the best films; to have people of the calibre of Joseph Cotten and Dolores Costello makes a film worth while at once. It is interesting, too, to see how good and intelligent direction can bring out good acting. Dolores del Rio, believe it or not, plays in Journey Into Fear, and is quite amazingly good.

These films should be seen; they are satisfying. And if you don't like "screwy" films, at least see them, and acknowledge Orson Welles's brilliance in experiment.