FILM CHRONICLE
395
Throughout these films a nightmare imagery runs that deepens this
sense of estrangement, of lines of communication severed.
The Clock
opens with the camera picking out the hero from a crowd in Penn
station as he seeks his way through; he emerges upon the street, stares up
at the skyscrapers and, looking seasick, hurries back in.
None But The
Lonely H eart
opens with the hero emerging out of fog on a lonely
avenue; he enters Westminster Abbey and stands before the tomb of the
unknown warrior, gazing. A stranger remarks, "Might be my son."
"1\Iight be my old man," he answers, broodingly, and wanders off.
Murder, My Sweet
opens-as the hero in flashback begins to recount
the events of film-with the camera moving out the window and down
nightlit city streets: that day he had been trying to trace a lost person,
but had not found him, had found out only how large a city it was.
A public with which one is continually thrown but with which one has
no live connection is a persistent image. In
The Clock,
in the cafeteria
scene, between the glances of the lovers the stranger's stare intrudes.
In
None But The Lonely Heart,
in the nightclub scene, the screen image
of the lovers sitting together is dissected incessantly by shadows of danc–
ing couples. In
The Clock,
as the two walk the streets they are jostled by
the crowds, and on the subway platform a crowd unthinkingly separates
them altogether. Both films, at moments of desperation for the lovers, cut
in from the background the unrelated laughter of strangers.
At one point in
None But the Lonely H eart
where the two are
having a lovers' quarrel on the street, a cop approaches and advises,
"There are places for such things; best find one." But the feeling is:
Where is such a place to be found? "The world I want can be small as
this room, but I have to know it will be there the next day," the girl
later pleads. Even songs casually inserted echo this sickness for home:
"The sad and lonely ones ... ," "Carry me back to San Francisco; bury
my body there!" The visions are unreal. When the girl in
To Have and ·
Have Not
talks of going home, it has little meaning, except that she is
tired of wandering. Hollywood of course does give us faithfully, one on
the heels of another, small town idylls that doggedly-a bit too doggedly?
-spread before our eyes home sweet home; but in
The Clock
when the
boy talks of returning to Mapleton after the war, and the girl asks why
Mapleton, he looks a little vague. He even adds, quite wonderfully,
"It's not that I don't want to see things." Sometimes what a character
will clutch at to provide that sense of community he misses, stands one's
hair on end, as when in
None But The Lonely Heart
the hero cries out
that perhaps war is the one answer-in war he would be fighting side by
side with others fighting for the same thing, brothers at last.
A world in which face answers face again, all the cries are for this;
and for a "place" again for love. But if love can find no place in the
world, then love has an answer: love will retire and make of itself its
own world. The camera knows how to assist. In the closeup it draws its
