AN EXCELLENT FILM

Evening Star, Issue 21784, 28 July 1934, Page 18

AN EXCELLENT FILM

1 FRIDAY THE 13TH’ AT THE STATE An ingenious picture, with considerable powcif in the manner of its narrative, ‘ Friday the 13th,’ is an excellent British film which had its premiere yesterday at the State Theatre. It gains strength from the two sources of its human and credible story and from the quality of its cast. Very carefully produced,' with great attention given to the smoothness of the development of the plot, it is a picture to excite the Imagination. The’idea behind the picture 'is clever and well restrained. Many women, and some men, read a novel by commencing at the last chapter to decide whether the development of the story is worth following to its conclusion. This common habit of readers is unique in film presentations, but it is exploited so cleverly in ‘ Friday the 13th ’ that it makes the film an outstanding British production. The audience sees an omnibus, just one of the grand fleet that serves the city of London, travelling through the streets on an evening of rain and thunderstorms. The passengers are of varied types. The day is a Friday and the thirteenth day of the month; the hour is two minutes short of midnight when two human lives are cut short in the stride of their individuality. The other people all are injured in the very middle of their contemplation ‘ of a future which it is for the picture to indicate. The explosion of death into the midst of this small band of people is given in the picture as a prologue to the story. A day is taken off life, and the story starts afresh in the morning of the fateful day to lead up to the point in these people’s lives when an accident changed them so irrevocably. It is from the beginning of the story that the picture achieves much of its strength. No license is taken to make tlic possibilities subordinate themselves to the effectiveness of the picture. The only due familiarity wliich is taken is to' select the people who are to partake of the ominous nature of the day. And, that the telling may be condensed within the time at the picture’s .'disposal it is necessary that every one of this band 'should be a distinct and interesting personality, that the development of the story may go on without strain. ■

There is a husband whose wife is betraying him behind his back, another husband whose wife keeps dogs, and semis, him to the park to exercise them and.find more pleasant diversion. There is a, “ slick ” stallholder from the Caledonian Market, and there are the policemen to.deceive him into betraying himself; there is a militant aunt and a round-eyed .schoolboy, up from the country to see the city; and there is a wife whose ’capacity for forgetting to do things leads her eventually to take the bus which is hurled into the accident by a Hash of lightning. Another passenger is a confidence rogue whose blackmail promises darkly to ruin two young lives just on the threshold of happiness, and there are the conductor and driver of the bus, men of superstition and considerable Cockney powers of polite badinage, and there is the dancer and her jealous school teacher lover.

These,- arc the people who come to ride in the bus on the night of Friday, the 13th; and it is for the narrative to demonstrate and to explain why they should come to be together on That journey!’; it is the background whichhas to be sketched lin, and it is the characters of the climax which have to be drawn forth from this backgrounds and prepared for the eruption of terror into all their Jives. It is for the story, the actors, and the photography of the picture to do this, and they have done it all excellently. When, suddenly, the driver sees impending doom and wrenches the wheel round to avert the accident the passengers of his bus are more than actors, gathered and brought by chance together—they are lives in whoso future the interest is gathering. The climax is exactly timed, the ending of the story satisfying, although the only two people in the bus in whose future no happiness lies are the only

two to be killed, and the brief clearing up of the prologue well planned and carefully explanatory. It is a type of picture, itself exceedingly stimulating, which bears considerable promise. As a revue star round whom much of the more intense part of the story gathers, Jessie Matthews gives a finely interpreted performance; Edmund Gwcnn is a stockbroker whose little tragedy of money brings a forgetful wife anxiously to the bus; Gordon Marker is a fussy, but essential, friend, who fits into the stockbroker’s day; Max Miller is the stallholder whose cunning leads him to go on the one particular journey; Eliot Makeham is the clerk whose death keeps him from seeing his wife’s unfaithfulness; Robertson Hare is the husband who is taken out by the dogs of his wife; and Muriel Aked, Hartley Power, Alfred Drayton, Emyln Williams as the blackmailer of the pleasing youngsters, Frank Lawton and Belle Chrystall, Leonora Corbett as a beuchsitter in the park, Ursula as the wife, and Sonnie Hale as a most impudent and delightful bus conductor, all add distinction to the cast. The supporting programme includes a Gaumont British News, and a further picture dealing with the travels of the Prince of Wales. The whole programme is uniformly good, and will bo repeated to-night and during the week.