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PAR TI SA N REVIEW
boundaries; and lest discord anywhere invade, it blurs the edges of the
screen. Music too has its role. There is a wonderful instance in
The
Clock
of the construction, on the spot, of love's world unto itself. The
two lovers are standing at dusk in Riverside Park. He has just told her
that he is to be shipped out. In the river beyond is the convoy that will
take him. The two stand at a painful distance from each other. A stranger
walks by with echoing step. She remarks upon how full always the city
is of sound, even at night. And loud now we hear in the distance horns,
subways, sirens. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, a sweet music springs
up, and drowns out all these other sounds, and wraps the lovers round.
They gaze at each other; they draw near; and the camera too draws
near, effacing from the screen the river and the convoy. The music,
mounting, delivers them into each others arms. Music has perhaps the
supreme power to deliver Hollywood lovers into a world apart.
The entirety of
The Enchanted Cottage
is set within the frame–
work of a musical composition. It is set, too, within the framework of
a flashback, which is another favorite device for isolating love's world.
And the moment of greatest happiness in the film, The Moment, is set
within another flashback within this flashback, and within this it is set
in a dream-it is as it were thrice, four times hidden away for safe–
keeping (like the giant's heart in ancient fairy tales, removed by him
carefully from his own body and hidden within a duck, within a well,
within a garden, within a castle.) The hero bends over his bride, whe
is still sleeping. Shhh, she whispers, don't wake me, I am dreaming such
a sweet dream. He asks her to describe her dream, and she describes
a fashionable wedding-the bride so pretty, the groom simply stunning,
and all the wedding guests so very jealous. They, of course, are the happy
couple.
I t is relevant to recall, with reference to the vacuity of this Moment,
conceived so very much in terms of the advertisements for Maybelline,
or Arrow collars, or a particular toothpaste, Donald Duck in
The Three
Caballeros
pursuing his visions of love, only to have them time after
time fade emptily. Love's world unto itself is only an hallucination. Its
empty fading is an apt nightmare.
Th e Enchanted Cottage
as a matter
of fact features just such a fading, when the hero's mother visits and
the spell is shattered: the sleek beauty love has bestowed on the two
falls from them. (But the spell is restored before curtain time.) The
makers of
None But The Lonely H eart
have an eye on the ultimate in–
substantiality of such a world, and labor to be true to this, in the manner
of real Art. But their rationale of just why it is insubstantial is extremely
gauche. In the end they do not really know what it is they know. In
the end they have to lay it all, mechanically, to the ex-husband: he will
not allow the two to find happiness. In a film like
Murder, My Sweet
the characters themselves have a cynical eye on things; never kid them-
