Fallen Idol. (Featuring Michele Morgan, Ralph Richardson and Bobby Henrey)
MENTAL HEALTH 57 Film Reviews
The background subject of the film deals with the usual triangle involving a kindly and well-meaning, but rather weak man (Ralph Richardson), a shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel), and a charming and attractive typist (Michele Morgan). The husband and wife are butler and housekeeper at a foreign Embassy in London. The wife, by a trick, manages to surprise her husband and the typist in a love scene at the Embassy, and while trying to spy upon them falls from the landing to the hall and is killed. The question arises as to the cause of her death. The police are called in, but are finally satisfied that it was an accident.
So far, so ordinary. If this were all it is doubtful if the film would have run for a week. But this is far from all, for the entire film is stolen by the brilliant and subtle direction and the quite outstanding acting of the Ambassador’s little son, (Bobby Henrey). The film resolves itself into a psychological study of the reaction of an eightyear-old child to the incomprehensible and unpredictable ” goings-on ” of the adults around him. We are given a most skilful and understanding picture of the only child who is always being told by pre-occupied adults to run off” and play, and who has very little emotional or mental contact with anyone in his environment. In these circumstances, he gives his unreserved affection to two objects?one human, the butler Baines, the other, reptile, a grass-snake, MacGregor. On the other hand, he feels equally unreserved hate and fear for the hard and sadistic Mrs. Baines, who bullies the child, nags her husband, and consigns MacGregor to the coke-boiler.
The child inevitably gets mixed up in the love affair of Baines and the typist, and, through his intense loyalty and hero worship, finds himself involved in a tissue of lies and self contradictions. Having succeeded unwittingly by his lies in making the police suspect Baines of murdering his wife, he equally unwittingly does his best to upset their conclusion that the death was accidental by trying frantically to tell the truth. Happily, the police by this time regard him as a completely unreliable witness, and the film ends with them refusing to listen to his desperate attempts to ” come clean “.
The way in which the child’s emotional conflicts are presented, his complete bewilderment and consequent distortion of values, constitutes one of the most remarkable psychological studies that the film has yet afforded us. It greatly adds to the realism that the child is neither particularly attractive nor intelligent; he is just a very average, rather sensitive, anxious little boy, and one feels that his behaviour and his reactions as portrayed in the film bear the hallmark of truth.
It will be interesting to see if the film is good ” box office D.M.O. The Night has a Thousand Eyes. (Featuring Edward G. Robinson, Gail Russell and John Lund.)
To see what position in society any group of people has, one should look, perhaps, not at a film about that group in particular, but at one in which a person of such a group appears incidentally. ” Fathers ” then will not be judged according to Life with Father, nor ” Mothers ” by / Remember Mama, but by any film you like in which a family appears by the way. By this criterion ” Fathers ” and ” Mothers ” and ” Doctors ” too (of physical illnesses, mind) show rather well ; a little sentimental perhaps, but kindly and on the whole sensible; clergymen and teachers are probably less acceptable, but even they reach great heights of popularity when compared with the “incidental ” psychiatrist?if one may so term him without disrespect (though if he has seen The Night has a Thousand Eyes he will be used to disrespect). This film caused these reflections, for it is not a story about psychiatry, and the incident in which the psychiatrists appear could be cut without affecting the plot. It seems, therefore, fair to contend that such characters can be assumed to be the man-in-the-street’s idea of a typical psychiatrist, rather than individuals like Mr. Milne in Mine Own Executioner. When we examine this typical psychiatrist, we find that he has three main characteristics; he is wrong in his judgment, he is ridiculous, he appears in connection with the supernatural. The chief character of the film is a man who forsees tragic events but is powerless to stop them. This male Cassandra in a vision sees the death of a young girl, with many attendant circumstances. For many reasons this touches him very nearly and he makes a desperate effort to influence and alter the chain of events. (For non-psychiatrists one may add that the suspense is intense, as the events that have been foretold follow one another with relentless regularity, and for those who have no lonely walk home or empty home to sleep in, this is good entertainment of its kind.) Soon the police appear on the scene and the prophet of disaster is interrogated. This is where the psychiatrists appear. The plot, of course, demands that all the forces of reason and authority shall not believe them and that nevertheless they shall be right, but one could hardly class these psychiatrists among the forces of reason. Supercilious references to endless pages of statistics, a patronizing gaze and a pompous manner seem to complete their repertoire?except for their capacity for deflation at the end of the interview.
It is always easy to overestimate the importance of such minor incidents, but one can safely say that public confidence in psychiatry has not been furthered by The Night has a Thousand Eyes. P.E.W.
Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill. (Featuring Marius Goring and David Farrer.)
There seems to be more respect now on the part of the cinema for the books which are adapted for the screen. Certainly if our present passion for psychiatry had existed in the bad old days, the story of Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill would have appeared in a new guise: Mr. Perrin’s increasing mental ill-health would have been noticed by Mr. Traill, who would have taken him to a psychologist. Mr. Perrin would then have made some ink-blots and associated such words as Trail-Hunting-Death, and then the story would have continued as Walpole made it.
For the absence of such an incident we must be thankful. How churlish then to go on to complain of the absence of psychology. But the story is in fact a psychological one. Here really is an opportunity of showing a psychological problem on the screen; the growth of envy and resentment and hatred in the mind of an aimiable, kindly but unsuccessful man, leading relentlessly to murder. The sinister quality of that unpleasant film, The Upturned Glass, would have been right here. If there was to be humour, its right place was among the children, whose happiness would have contrasted with the warped minds of the adults. But this film had humour in every part and so it became just a light and amusing picture, enjoyable, certainly, especially to those who like stories about schools, but not Mr. Walpole’s Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill. The Headmaster is so awful that the audience gasped?not so much with real horror, I think, as with a kind of pleasurable incredulity. The common-room is so good a caricature of the worst elements in any bad common-room that it produced gurgles of delight at the absurdity of human nature that values so highly its petty privileges and rights. But there was no horror, no tension, no awareness of impending doom, except once when the young master’s engagement was told to Mr. Perrin. Even then the feeling was pity rather than alarm. To take the filming of Walpole’s story seriously is to regret an opportunity lost; to take the film at its own value is to spend a most enjoyable evening.
P.E.W. The Quiet One. (Produced by the Wiltwick School for Maladjusted Children, New York.) This film is an excellent study of maladjustment. It deals with the case of a small negro boy, who was unwanted and unloved at home, his background before entering school, and treatment and psychological development after coming to the school. The film is subtle, slow and extremely sympathetic. The school has 80 boys who on account of race, religion, colour or bad home circumstances, have become maladjusted. The film describes slowly the early background of the child, his tired and worn-out grandmother, his mother, who does not want him, the boy’s backwardness at school as a result of emotional difficulties, his loneliness in the big city, his inability to make friends with anyone, and his suppressed hatred and misery. After coming to the school, the boy is for a long time an outsider, but slowly, with the help of the doctor, he forms a great attachment to one of the masters, but has grave set-backs because he becomes possessive and jealous of the other children with regard to this master. There is one excellent scene: a pottery class, where the boy is making a bowl of clay, and suddenly tries to transform it into a sea shell. This brings back memories of when he was a little boy playing by the sea, digging in the sand with his mother and father and grandmother. This becomes the turning point in his development and from then on he is more able to face life. The film has few spoken words and most of what it has to convey is presented pictorially. It can be shown on special request to private selected audiences, and application should be made to: Mr. Sinclair Road, Film Centre, 34 Soho Square, W.l. E.H.R.
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