306
PARTISAN REVIEW
ground: the orderly and impersonal comfort of an upper middle class
apartment, the hard surfaces of a bank, the ugly and cheap profusion
of a chain drugstore, the plain facts of a street-all photographed simply
as what happens to be really there, without sympathy or revulsion, with–
out "tricks"-almost, in a sense, without art, if one were not conscious
all the time of how much arrangement has gone into this matter-of-fact
detail. One recognizes everything and in the end this recognition is
all the excitement, for what is on the screen becomes finally as accus–
tomed and undramatic as the shabby decor of the theater itself. The
actors, too, are so manipulated as to become embodiments of the physical
reality
of~
human beings. More clearly than the important events of
the plot, one remembers how the actors hold their bodies: Teresa Wright
slouched over a stove, so much like a real woman over a real stove
that the scene can become almost unpleasant, as it was certainly not
intended
to
be; or Fredric March and Dana Andrews quarreling across
a table, with their muscles set, two stupid men acting as they think
proper in what they conceive to be a moment of drama-this, too,
was not intended, but the physical appearances have so strong a hold
on the director that he is himself exactly on a level with his material:
he sees how everything must look, but frequently he cannot see what
it really means.
The dialogue follows the same pattern. Whatever is said is as close
as possible to what people are likely to say; not
these
people, particu–
larly (they have little individuality), but people in general, Hollywood's
imagined American and everybody's possible neighbor, a little Jess in–
fantile than Hollywood usually makes him (since this is a "serious" ·
movie), but just as uncomplicated and predictable as he might appear
to be (but probably would
not
be) if he were a real person on any
real street. I do not recall that any character ever says anything that
is particularly interesting in itself and that could not just as well be
something else, but the talk is always quite real, except in two o.r three
mawkish attempts at eloquence.
All this makes most of the movie flat and boring, unless one is
ready to accept its pretensions or to delight in its mere virtuosity. What
you see always has a certain interest because it is so recognizable, but
what you see is all there is; each character announces himself imme–
diately and in full, each situation is immediately and completely un–
derstood. This does not mean that everything is explicit, but the sug–
gestions are kept strictly within limits: at any moment, whatever is
meant but not stated is only one thing and is always clear. (I saw the
movie a second time and found only occasional details of realism that
I had missed, but no new meanings. This is significant, for one expects ·
of a movie that exhibits so much talent and technical mastery that it
should be almost infinitely suggestive, as
The Informer
was, for instance,
