Cinema, Also Showing Nov. 17, 1947

Beware of Pity (J. Arthur Rank) is a cinemadaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novel, one of those puddle-depth stories that, draining themselves with a sort of literary eye dropper, pretend to contain oceans of ideas. The tedious technique might seem justified if it conveyed vivid people, or even lively situations. Beware of Pity conveys only one droplet of an idea (there are two kinds of pity: good & bad) diluted in gallons of plot.

Out of pity, a young Austrian soldier (Albert Lieven) takes to calling on the crippled daughter (Lilli Palmer) of a wealthy old baron (Ernest Thesiger). She falls in love; he doesn’t. She confesses her passion; he gallantly flees in a panic. Her doctor”(Sir Cedric Hardwicke) warns the soldier that if the girl’s hope of winning him dies, she will die, too.

When pity finally traps him into becoming engaged, he gets into another panic and runs away again. But while running it occurs to him that compassion is the better part of pity. He returns to make up, but finds that the despairing lady has already thrown herself over a cliff.

Sir Cedric Hardwicke does handsomely by the doctor. Lilli Palmer, as the unhappy lady, is a past mistress of the moist eye and the tragic gesture.

The Unfinished Dance (M-G-M). Little Margaret O’Brien, a “sparrow” (apprentice) in a ballet theater, has a schoolgirl crush on Cyd Charisse, a promising ballerina. Margaret hates Karin Booth, the premiere danseuse, because she thinks Cyd should have the top ballerina’s job. If only something awful would happen to Karin!

One night while everybody is watching Karin dance Swan Lake, Margaret pulls a lever to put out all the lights. This winsome prank opens a trapdoor onstage instead. Karin falls through and injures herself so badly that she can never dance again. How Margaret suffers! But at last she confesses and Karin forgives her, partly because “she’s a strange child,” partly because “today is today.”

All ends with little Margaret, wistful as a hand-painted freckle, watching Cyd & company execute what seems to be a ballet interpretation of the Birth of the Universe, set to the elemental strains of David Rose’s Holiday for Strings. la Technicolor.

Man About Town (RKO Radio; Pathe) is the first movie that René Clair has made in France since 1934. The Brussels World Film Festival recently chose it—under its original title, Le Silence Est d’Or—as the finest motion picture made anywhere last year.

It is certainly a finished piece of work, and it contains the bright promise that René Clair, one of the few outstanding talents in the film business, may not have finished his real work in the movies. Yet after completing Man About Town, Director Clair returned to Hollywood, an environment that has somewhat cramped his style for years. The sense of something finished hangs over the very conception of the film: it is, primarily and masterfully, an essay on moviemaking.

Clair has phrased his essay as a gentle caricature of a motion picture—more particularly, of the French motion picture as it was bequeathed to him by the pre-’20s pioneers. Man About Town’s story line is one that the movies have worn to a smudge: Maurice Chevalier instructs a youngster (François Perier) in the Art of Love. Thereupon the youngster steals the oldster’s girl (Marcelle Derrien). The parody is heightened by direction that reduces action almost to a puppet-like simplicity, and by a harsh lighting that gives actors and sets the two-dimensional look of paper cutouts.

The soundtrack, without background music, is parodic, too. But as in the great silents, the story has more than enough rhythm to move the picture. And Clair has deftly underscored the rhythm with severe, clear cutting.

All this might remain just an intricate, private, directorial joke, except that Clair gives the show away with a colossal wink: the principals are engaged in making 1906 movies, and Clair’s camera inspects some prime ribs of primitive cinemacting with all the grave astonishment of a visitor from another planet.

Yet Man About Town is more than a complex piece of Clair irony. It is also a simple hymn to Paris. In the opening shot of the film, the camera kisses the cool, wet cobblestones of an alley. The screen is full of tender glances at rust-crusted sinks, at the lovelight in the eyes of streetlamps, at tired mustaches, at a street fiddler’s tobacco-stained teeth, and at lovely women who (in a travesty of nostalgia) all look alike.

It may be difficult for U.S. moviegoers, even those who know enough French, to savor all these flavors. In order to insure wide U.S. distribution of the film, RKO has added to the soundtrack an English narration by Maurice Chevalier. This device, though useful, is about as welcome as having program notes read aloud during a Chopin nocturne.