Punch at the Cinema [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Dilys Powell Images moving in black and white or colour on a screen at the end of a darkened room: that is the cinema. The images are shadows of a reality which is itself a fake. But they talk, sing, dance, fight, suffer, make love and die. And they stir the spectator. They excite rage and delight, pity, terror, grief, affection, nausea, revulsion, adulation and hilarity. They inhabit a world which is intangible; we watch but cannot enter it. Only on rare occasions can we meet, can we converse with its inhabitants or its creators when they float down to our level. This book, drawn from the pages of PUNCH—and the pages of PUNCH, entertaining, witty, critically amused, are basically far more serious, when seriousness is needed, than they are given credit for—this book is a record of reactions to the cinema; you will find some of the reactions listed above. Silent movies are not really covered and so some famous figures are absent: no study, for instance, of the exquisite Lillian Gish (though she moved without diminution into the sound cinema). Chaplin of course is here, belonging as he did to both silents and talkies; but the great Buster Keaton scrapes in with only a reference. Garbo is here (a critic writing about her betrays a preference for Dietrich); John Gilbert survives not as the great lover but as the star whose voice— squeaky, lacking in the resonance of amorous fervour—when the talkies arrived destroyed him. But then PUNCH does not go to the cinema to provide a handbook for historians, and the pieces here selected very properly keep a balance between assessment, appreciation and fun. Professional interest leads me to look first at the reviews of individual films: at Richard Mallett extolling the qualities of Brief Encounter and Barry Took expressing a preference for Star Wars over Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I am struck by the differences—a matter of period, perhaps—in approach: the well- bred remoteness of E. V. Lucas, toying with Kid Galahad, and the immediacy, the contemporary feeling of Benny Green—a feeling which makes him relate the character played by Jack Lemmon in Save the Tiger to his own view of life—makes him, rightly in my opinion, admire the film. Critics nowadays take a more deeply personal attitude: sometimes a deeply exasperated one. But I am indulging myself. I am neglecting the main drive of a book which is full of pleasures: the occasional excursions, for example, into another kind of personal experience: a heart-felt cry from a writer hired and sacked and hired again, and once required to rewrite his script not because it did not do the job but because a different star had been engaged. And I treasure Barry Humphries's account of the struggle, in filming The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, to get the riches of Australian speech past the delicacy of the British censor. These practical experiences indeed are the blood and bones of the book. And speaking of blood and bones I think of Carl Foreman, writer of High Noon, and his answer, good manners veiling bitterness, to John Wayne, who in the McCarthy days did his best to see that Mr Foreman and a good many other gifted people