THERE is more of method in “The Moon and Sixpence” than there is of Charles Strickland, whose life it pretends to be. Instead of going directly to Strickland (George Sanders), the movie sends a writer (Herbert Marshall) around to ask about Strickland, and intermittently, by word of mouth, you get a bare outline of his life. He was a dull, middle-aged stockbroker who suddenly got a compulsion to paint, and felt he had to break completely with society to do it—going as far as Tahiti, where he married an underslung, sloe-eyed native girl, caught leprosy, went blind and died. Mostly, though, you get a lot of Herbert Marshall and some rather interesting people to talk to you; some of them new movie faces: Strickland’s white wife and his mistress, Molly Lamont and Doris Dudley, both strikingly cold, tense women; three Tahitian personalities, Eric Blore, Florence Bates and Albert Bassermann.
The method, though, is artifice, since it doesn’t show why such a stick-in-the-mud stockbroker suddenly became so brave an artist, nor why he had to break with society to do it, nor why he suddenly changed from being an iconoclast to someone who went through a marriage ceremony, nor, and most important, what kind of man he was beyond the superficial vocalization and the fact that he looked like Robinson Crusoe. His whole life on Tahiti, for instance, is no more than Hollywood’s familiar cliché of South Sea life—hula dances, alcoholics and Dorothy Lamour characters. Behind the evasion, of course, is censorship, which makes direct biography almost impossible, and cuts all the vitality out of movies like this one.
The little it does show is done to a crisp, good-looking if stilted, adequately played, and made for grown-ups. The mere outline of Strickland’s life is interesting, but the best moments have nothing to do with anything except the acting virtuosity of the several minor characters. Then, at the end, you are finally shown what kind of paintings Strickland made; it is no worse than the Technicolor, but there aren’t many good paintings being done this year or ever, and those not for the United Artists Movie Co.
The twelve war documentaries from England called “Inside Great Britain” are worth seeing, even beyond the educational implications and despite the superfluous commentaries. The English get more variety into their documentaries than we do. There are studies here of a troopship, a railroad, a shunter, a bricklayer, and a funny one which is just the animation of abstract color patterns to “The Bugle Call Rag”—and even so carries a message. Also there’s a nicely done regeneration of a file clerk into a toolmaker, starring, among others, Ernest Bevin. The English prove here again that they know more about photography and editing than Hollywood, and that the documentary is better than the star-system ever will be (the worst one here is a glossy, sluggish, hoked-up one starring Leslie Howard). Incidentally, twelve is too many.
There are a number of laughs in “My Sister Eileen,” depending on what you laugh at and whether you want to, and if you can stand seventy minutes of wisecracks. The laughs in these revamped stage comedies are no excuse for what goes with them: the characterizations are awful, because everyone is either, without rhyme or reason, a stooge or a wiseacre, the situations are always ending woefully short of the time and space needed for screen humor, and the technique, which isn’t far from the two-line Pat and Mike joke, gets stale and obnoxiously obvious.
October 19, 1942