Film

*** Melodrama

None but the Lonely Heart is a lengthy film of a type very popular of late—all about Life. It is supposed to be about life in the slums of London, and it has lots of emotional acting of the breast-clutching brand. The slums portrayed have, however, been cleaned up a good deal in their translation to the screen. Readers of Llewellyn's book will remember the slime oozing from the cracks in the floor and the scum floating on the surface of the water in the basin, and generally the sordid hell of the East End. There are some of the most revolting descriptions of actual physical living conditions, and I was rather surprised to find [gap — reason: illegible] Mott's squalid little back kitchen transformed into a smug Dickensy parlour with the kettle on the hob and a very clean tablecloth. Ma herself seems to have had a wash, too. The only concession left to Mr. Llewellyn, indeed, is that she wears a character hat all the time, indoors and out. However, it may well be that this criticism is unjust, because I gagged so much on the book that I put it down unfinished and I got so fed-up with the film that I left at about the hour-and-forty-minute mark. What Hollywood has done to the end I can thus only surmise, but I wouldn't mind betting that Virtue is squared somehow and the assembled cast walk forward into a rosy sunset.

Now, this film is a beautiful example of what happens to novels about Life which go on to the screen. They are nearly always long, and usually sordid, and Hollywood tries to get everything in. This, of course, is impossible, and so we are presented with the big moments tied together with a very tenuous thread. The effect is very disconcerting. I dizzily asked myself several times how some sequences could possibly have anything to do with those preceding them. One could almost suspect that, having got tangled hopelessly in one particular scene, the producer just started all over again on another tack. I was particularly struck by the scanty tracing of Ernie from a no 'count bum to a small-time crook, and I would like to question also the fifty pounds a week which Mordinoy was supposed to be paying him; it appeared very easy money indeed to me; what was the gang doing? A single brief reference to a "job" in a fur warehouse doesn't seem to me to indicate the real big-time crookedness.

Mr. Cary Grant is, I think, not very good as Ernie Mott. I had a sneaking feeling all the time that he wasn't Ernie, but just Cary Grant pretending to be Ernie. Ethel Barrymore plays Ma, and I regret to reveal that she is rather bad. Ma has A Cancer, see, and Miss B. has it in the stagiest possible manner, with The Tablets, and the grinning-and-bearing-it and all the accompanying fal-lals. (I trust, by the way, that the British Medical Association has noticed the miraculous effects that yeast tablets appear to have in relieving the pain associated with cancer.) I was distressed to see Miss Barrymore actually simpering at times, and her coy sideways looks were frequent. It seems to me that the Barrymore family would have done very-much better for themselves had they stayed on the stage. Diana, who has made some very bad films indeed, is evidently quite competent on Broadway; John, one of the finest actors America has aver produced, was involved in some very unfortunate film ventures before he drank himself to, death; Lionel—well, if Lionel had stayed on the board we wouldn't have had the Doctor Kildare films, would we? and Ethel, in my opinion, has not increased her stature as an actress with the film under discussion.

Barry Fitzgerald is His Own Lovable Self, and when you've said that, you've said everything. June Duprez acts in a very peculiar fashion, and Jane. Wyatt is good in a role with not a great deal of scope. The best character, whose name I did not catch, was the actor who played Mordinoy.

All in all, this is a very unsatisfactory film.

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