Word: directors
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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According to Rodgers & Hart, Hollywood's trouble is stupidity, not malice. "And you can no more resent stupidity in a movie director than in an elevator boy." Headline boner where they were concerned came when, in the sheet music made for Mississippi, Swanee River was credited to "Rodgers & Hart." They differ concerning Hollywood's financial rewards. Hart believes they could make more money there than on Broadway, but prefers to forego it because he loves the theatre. Rodgers feels that a Hollywood income may be more certain but that only in the theatre can musicomedy writers really strike...
...fighting, it investigates a group of French inmates of a German prison camp. The prisoners-principally an austere patrician, Captain de Boeldieu (Pierre Fresnay), his mechanic, Marechal (Jean Gabin), and a generous fellow, Rosenthal (Dalio), who shares the canned delicacies sent by his rich family-naturally try to escape. Director Renoir, however, builds his plot, not around the success or failure of this enterprise, but around their relations with each other, with their guards, with the gloomy German officer, von Rauffenstein (Erich von Stroheim) in whose fortress they are finally interned...
...interlude when Marechal and Rosenthal try to escape to Switzerland, and a German peasant woman shelters them on her lonely farm. The pastoral ends. A border patrol fires at the two fugitives in the snow. The shrill ring of the shots is the more shocking because they seem-as Director Renoir wishes to make war seem-completely out of place, too horrible to be more than an illusion...
Superbly acted, with English titles to translate its polyglot dialogue, Grand Illusion's principal defect is that an occasional exaggerated attention to detail tends to retard its pace. It is notable for restoring Erich von Stroheim (a top-priced director until a combination of extravagant pictures and his own erratic temperament cut short his Hollywood career) to the screen in a more sympathetic role than those he used to play. Good shot: the moment at the dress rehearsal of a prison show when the first member of the cast tries on a woman's dress...
Mothers and Sons (Mosfilm). Veteran Director V. Pudovkin turns his attention to Soviet aviation. Players include E. Korchagina-Alexandrovskaya (as the Mother), J. Stalin (as local color...