SIMON GROWS UP

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVI, Issue 21380, 24 June 1939, Page 16

SIMON GROWS UP

Powerful French Film All the time Simon Simone was in Hollywood, two things were said to keep her from success: her babyish appearance and her untamed temperament. They drove her home to France last year. Now the film she made on her return, “La Bete Humaine,” has reached London. Neither of Simone’s alleged defects has prevented her from proving triumphantly, in this picture, that three years of Hollywood failure have not made her forget how to act. Simone may be just as temperamental in France as in America. But French directors care less about an actress’ moods off the screen than on. They have given Simone a part which would keep any temperament busy. It is also a full-grown part which simply disregards Simone's perpetual youthfulness. Simone plays a working-man’s wife, who has a psychopathic fear of sex,

because she was brutally seduced when she was 16. Her complex seems to be cured when she falls in love with Jean Gabin. But her warped nature makes her goad Gabin to murder her husband; and by doing so she lets loose her lover’s homicidal mania on herself. That is the ugly story. You could hardly call Simone’s part an attractive one. But it allows her to give a performance of quite startling subtlety and power. There is more force of feeling, more restraint and more intelligence in this performance than in all Simone's Hollywood efforts put together. In France there is no reason to fear that it will type her in similar sordid dramas. Rather, with the new reputation of French films, it opens up the possibility that Simone may have returned to a wider popularity than she ever enjoyed in American films.