ITALY: Man of Aran

Chattering gaily, the crowds trooped out of the ornate Excelsior Palace Hotel at the Lido last week, and hurried, depending on their circumstances, to their private launches or to the grimy vaporetto to Venice. After four weeks of showings the Second International Motion Picture Exposition was over.

There were plenty of prizes, but, as suspected, the very carnal Czechoslovakian film Exstase, even though it so far surpassed every other film in popularity that the Vatican’s Osservatore Romano was forced to publish biting editorials (TIME, Aug. 27), won none of them. Prize for the most entertaining film went to Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night. Douglas Fairbanks’ British-made Private Life of Don Juan was voted the best world première. For giving the largest presentation of films, the Motion Picture Producers & Distributors of America got a loving cup. Acclaimed as the world’s best cinema performers were Katharine Hepburn and Wallace Beery. They got gold medals. So did Mickey Mouse.

Chief prize of the exhibition, the Mussolini Cup for the best foreign film, went to a decorous, highly instructive spool entitled Man of Aran.

Produced by Gainsborough Pictures, filmed on a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland, Man of Aran was rehearsed, directed, filmed, developed, printed and cut by a U. S. citizen—the same Robert J. Flaherty who made a great cinema reputation with his Nanook of the North and Moana of the South Seas.

Like those two films, Man of Aran has only a rudimentary plot and no professional actors. Relying on superb photography, a strapping fishwife named Maggie Dirrane (who acted as Flaherty’s housemaid between scenes), a handsome child named Michael and a curly-haired fisherman known as Tiger King, the film shows the daily life of the Aran Islanders, their barren homes where garden soil must be gathered in baskets from crevices in the rock, their frail seagoing curraghs of tarred skins stretched over basketwork frames. High spot in the film is the harpooning of a 30-ft. basking shark by Tiger King & friends.

President Eamon de Valera deigned to pay his first visit to a cinema in Ireland for the film’s premiere in Dublin.. Most of the Irish Free State Cabinet was also on hand. And smiling behind the fluttering ribbons of his glasses went William Butler Yeats. Man of Aran has not yet been released in the U. S.