'THE SIN OF MADELON CLAUDET'

Evening Star, Issue 21077, 14 April 1932, Page 6

'THE SIN OF MADELON CLAUDET'

POWERFUL DRAMA FOR ST. JAMES “ Tho magnificent acting of Helen Hayes, the New York actress, in the film version of Edward Knoblock’s powerful drama, ‘ The Sin of Madelon Claudet/ is something that no lover of tho dramatic art can afford to miss,'' says a northern critic. A stage celebrity in her native country, Miss Hayes has the personality and adaptability to score an instant success in the shadow medium, and her patent knowledge and experience of the art commands the instant admiration of all who watch her work. She has, moreover, been fortunately cast in a play that offers scope for acting in the grand manner. There is nothing nambypamby about ‘ The Sin ot Madelon Claudet.’ Its story within a story is a tragedy worthy of the greater novelists. It tells the clean-cut life history of a woman whose first misfortune, brought about through no fault of her own, sends her falling from the glittering heights of happiness to the depths of degradation and despair. It is a theme written on the Victor Hugo scale with Paris for its setting, a Pans which the camera has made more probable than is too often depicted in the films. The screen has not witnessed for a long time such _ heart-gripping scenes as those in which the pitiable unfortunate, reduced to utter penury, pays her last visit to her son, now a fashionable doctor, who is ignorant of his relation to her. In this moving episode, as also in that‘in which she visits her boy in the orphanage some years previously, Miss Hayes leaves no doubt as to her ability, and no one can' witness her intensely emotional performance- without being profoundly moved. The mere facial change from innocent happy girlhood to bitter old age is effected with pitiless fidelity, providing a dramatic metamorphosis of the most startling order. It is unquestionably one of the finest performances seen on the screen during the last twelve months. _ Nor must tho powerful support of Lewis Stone and Jean Hcrsholb be forgotten, nor the skilled assistance of Robert Young,. Chit Edwards, and Marie Prevost. ‘ The Sin of Madelon Claudet opens at the St. James Theatre to-morrow.