WATCH ON THE RHINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 346, 8 February 1946, Page 16

WATCH ON THE RHINE

(Warner Bros.)

HIS film was made in the middle of 1943 and has only recently reached Wellington. I wonder whether the

local deadlock over Warner Bros. releases is wholly to blame, or ‘whether opposition to the play by some adherents of the Vansittart school of thought (including the Noble Lord himself, who is said to have disliked it because it suggested that good Germans do exist) had anything to do with the. delay. Whatever the explanation, the result seems to me rather unfortunate, for in three years Watch on the Rhine has lost a good deal of its point and purpose. The concentration camp disclosures have convinced us now, or should have convinced us, that there were some Germans before the war as well as during it who were not prepared to follow Hitler blindly, but in 1943 comparatively few people recognised this, and fewer still had the courage to say it. Lillian Hellman was one of the few, and she expressed her convictions passionately in her Broadway play Watch on the Rhine. She was, indeed, so passionate in her dislike of anybody who might be labelled "pro-fascist" and so warmly approving of anybody in the other camp, that her chief characters tend to be too sharply classified into "goodies" and "baddies" and to this ex- tent are artificial. Nevertheless, even at this late stage, Watch on the Rhine still has something very worthwhile to say--especially about the universal nature of the struggle against fascismand thanks to expert acting the film version says it extremely well. The direction is not as expert as the acting, however. Though the film fully merits a stand-up clap from the emotional and ideological viewpoint, technically as well as intellectually it falls a little short of that standard. The fault here, I think, is that the man who put the film on the screen was the same man (Herman Shumlin) who put it so successfully on the Broadway stage. But the screen is not like the stage and never can or should be, and Mr. Shumlin has fallen into the error of thinking that it is. So the rather theatrical quality which was already inherent in the play--wright’s conception of some of the characters and situations is heightened by the producer’s theatrical presentation of them on the screen. By "theatrical" I do not mean simply melodramatic or incredible, for the history of the last few years should have taught us that much of real life is melodramatic and incredible. I mean that there i¢ a staginess of technique about Watch on the Rhine which not all the fine acting, fine writing, and fine talking can quite overcome. And even some of the acting bears too clearly, for cinema purposes, the mark of its stage origins. This is particularly the case with Donald Woods, who gives a thoroughly wooden portrayal. Even Pau! Lukas’ notable performance as Kurt Muller (for which he won an Academy Award) might have been still more notable, I think, if he had been directed by a man who thor-

oughly understood the nature of the cinema and who, instead of making Lukas simply repeat on the screen a performance he had already made famous on the stage, had required him to vary it to suit the new medium, Yet, however much one may legitimately criticise Watch on the Rhine for what it might have been, this story about an heroic German anti-fascist-a "professional" anti-fascist-who takes refuge with his wife (Bette Davis) and family in America, but finds no peace, is without question a very enthralling and often deeply moving drama, of which one can sincerely say that it is much better to have seen it late than never.