Korda's Crusade For Laughter

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22402, 24 April 1936, Page 14 (Supplement)

Korda's Crusade For Laughter

FAMOUS PRODUCER ALTERS HIS PLANS COCIAL comedy, it seems at last, is coming back to English audiences by way of tho screen, says a London writer. , Alexander Korda, he adds, has postponed the most important picture on his current schedule, " Cyrano de Bergerac," in favour of a social comedy of London life. Charles Laughton, who was to have set to work immediately in the part of Cyrano, will now appear as a product of the public school and the Saville-row tailor —a splid ex-guardsman type —his days bounded by a Piccadilly club and his nights by the Midnight Follies of a Mayfair hotel. The script, it seems, will be written by Frederick Lonsdale, and the film will impartially rap the knuckles of all fashionable London. Mr. Korda has not changed over his schedule without serious deliberation. He has a feeling—and Korda's flairs in such things aro uncannily accurate—that romance and tragedy can wait, but that the omens are all set for an early renaissance of English comedy. For many years the present generation, upbred on the illusions of the cinema's world of sweetness and light, have forgotten how to laugh at themselves without rancour, as men did in ■ the days of Gay and Fielding and Smollett. Hard-hitting slapstick we have enjoyed, but real comedy —the comedy that demands a perception in the spectator as quick and cultivated as the wit of the writer—has long evaded us. Now at last that perception seems to be growing. In some degree the influence of broadcasting is responsible for a new way of looking at life. In some degree the stress of extraordinary events abroad has made us more keenly conscious of the ordinary affairs at home. For the first time a comedy like " The Ghost Goes West "• is able to command a cinema audience as fully alive to its implications as the social satirist who framed it. Now, when public apprehension coincides with technical proficiency, is just the moment for a new comic cinema to be born. . Korda, much travelled, widely read, is quick to sense these spiritual crises and to meet them. But he is the producer only; he must have directors to work with him. Since the coming of sound into cinema only Rene Clair, of all film directors, seems fully equipped with the clear sense of social comedy. There is, of course, Chaplin, the writer adds, whose new picture " Modern Times " contains what is emphatically a social argument. But " Modern Times " is a polemic picture. Under pressure of its subject the common-sense of Chaplin tends to grow impatient and angry. This is satire, not comedy, for comedy knows that impatience is in itself ridiculous. The real comedy gives folly chase " with the springing delight of hawk over heron, hound after fox, never fretting, never tiring, sure of having her, allowing her no rest." Clair's wit alone in the cinema is of such a kind. " I think it is obvious that Korda will use Clair as the spearhead of his crusade for laughter," the writer adds. " The French director has at least two more pictures to make in England, and already his dry wit is playing over the London scene. For ten years the bourgeois streets of Paris have been his comic playground. In time we shall have raised up comedy directors of our own, but in the meanwhile there can bo nothing more salutary for the English public than that we should be mocked and tumbled and pricked out of our complacency by this brilliant little Frenchman. For we have been sick for years for want of laughter, and the more we laugh at ourselves, not with the bitterness of satire, nor the guffaw of slapstick, but with the blessed common sense of comedy, the quicker and more permanent will our recovery be."