TWO CITIES HONOR IMMORTAL MEMORY

Weather doesn’t faze admirers
of Burnsin Vancouver, Edmonton

BRAVING A snowstorm which
blocked roads and disrupted traf-
fic, more than a hundred people
sat down to the second annual
Burns Supper sponsored by New
Frontiers in Hastings Auditorium
here last Saturday.

Bill Sheekey presided at the
supper and the Address to the
Haggis was given by Archie Mc-
Gugan. The toast to the Lassies
was proposed by Bill Sheekey and
replied to by Mrs. Hamilton.

In his tribute to the Immortal
Memory, Bill Stewart pointed to
the guiding principles of Robert
Burns’ life, “the principles that
are seldom touched upon at con-
ventional Burns affairs” — his
fight against oppression, his active
support of the French Revolution,
his love of liberty.

At the supper entertainment
program two dancers from Al
Gallaher’s studio, Heather Mac-
donald and Beverley Johnson,
drew repeated encores with their
Highland dancing, and Donald
Macdonald won prolonged ap-
plause for his recitation of Burns’
“Tree of Liberty.”

WILLIAM STEWART

The evening concluded with
songs and recitations by many of
those attending and Scottish danc-
ing.

LABOR’S annual celebration of
Burns Night, which has become a
tradition in Edmonton, drew a
large crowd to Oddfellows Temple
in that city last Saturday despite
25-below weather.

Al Murdoch, replying to the
toast to the Immortal Memory,
drew a parallel between Burns’
rallying call for Scottish indepen-
dence from English domination
and the rallying of the Canadian
people today in the growing na-
tional struggle against Yankee
imperialism. In both instances,
he said, it was the traitorous ele-
ments within the country who
sold out the people’s interests.

Greetings were read from
Pierre Cot, member of the French
National Assembly, (the greetings
were sent by proxy because Cot
is seriously ill); Howard Fast,
world-famous U.S. novelist; Tom
McEwen, editor of the Pacific
Tribune; Charles Sims, editor of
the Canadian Tribune; Peter Pro-
kop, general secretary of the As-
sociation of United Ukrainian
Canadians.

Toulouse-Lautrec’s art skilfully

woven into ‘Moulin Rouge’ story

IN THE INTERVALS of drink-
ing himself to an early death,
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec paint-
ed the glitter and squalor of a
dying epoch in flat uncompromis-
‘ing tones.

A childhood accident had left
him a cripple, his legs grotesque-
ly shortened. A life of pain, re-
lieved by brandy, among the cafes
and dance-halls of Montmartre
had left him without illusions.

With the talent of a major

artist of his time he set down un-
sentimentally, without romantic-
ism, the can-can girls, dance-hall
singers and prostitutes among
whom he lived.
.. Now, by an ironic twist, this
bitter realist has become the cen-
tral figure of a skilful and ambit-
ious piece of romanticising.

‘In John Huston’s new film,
Moulin Rouge, he has been fitted
out with a standard Hollywood
romantic tragedy to enact and a
set of period epigrams to deliver.

His function here is to con-
tribute his art, his grotesqueness»
and selected parts of his history
to the most thoroughgoing essay
to date in the current cult of late
Victorian decadence.

Huston, the American director '

of The African Queen who made
this film in Paris and in Britain,
is no mere Hollywood hack. There
is talent and intelligence at work
here and parts of the Picture are
brilliant. pune ;

Toulouse-Lautrec’s posters and
paintings have been woven into
the fabric of the film in an ad-
mirable way and the color, move-
ment and spectacle of the dance-
hall scenes, based on the famous
posters, are a delight.

* * *

if HUSTON had based his
story on the outlook revealed by
‘the paintings as closely as he has
based his colors on them, this
might have been a great film.

Instead it remains a film which
perpetuates a legend instead of
revealing a man, disappointing in
its failures but in the present
state of the cinema well worth
seeing for its successes.

Its successes, apart from the
color, are Colette Marchand, a
young French ballet dancer turn-

ed actress, as the slut of the
streets for whom Toulouse-Lau-
trec conceives a passion, Suzanne
Flon as a serious-minded girl who
loves the painter in spite of his
deformity, and nearly all the
dancers.

It is good, too, to see a painter
depicted as concerned about his
craftsmanship instead of throw-
ing off masterpieces without
thought or effort. We learn that
there is more to producing a
poster than just painting it.

* * te

THE SCENES IN the Moulin
Rouge dance-hall succeed in get-
ting something fresh out of the
now hackneyed caperings with
black stockings and frilly under-
wear, though there is a tendency
here to fall back on the conven-
tions of fighting women and
goggle-eyed Englishmen.

Among the failures of the film
is Jose Ferer, in thick black beard
and bowler, who plays through-
out on his knees as the crippled
painter. Perhaps because of the
physical strain of doing so, his
performance is flat and lifeless.

Zsa Zsa Gabor, as Jane Avril,

~ the singer Toulouse-Lautrec drew
and painted so often, seems to

have strayed in from another film.
x Ke

PERHAPS THE most difficult
quality of all to manufacture by
Hollywood’s assembly-line meth-
ods is charm.

Feed the right number of test-
ed, properly processed gags to a
trained funny man and the result
is comedy of a kind — often of a
very amusing kind. :

‘Put a stock dramatic character
into a stock’ dramatic situation,
set the thing in motion according
to well-tried rules, and it is still
Posssible for drama of a sort to
result.

But put all the film ideas that
have been tested and found
charming into a film in which all
the characters are warranted
whimsical, and instead of getting
charm you’ll have the customer
squirming in his seat with embar-
rassment.

_ So the customer rightly sus-
pects that Lili is going to be what

q

publicity men love to call “heart-
warming” as soon as the film
opens with a quaint Brench open-
air market in which three young
men are buying provisions and
exchanging badinage with stall-
holders.

* It may be taken as a safe work-
ing rule that young men in French
marketplaces are going to be gay
and whimsical, even if they don’t
break out into a song and dance
on the spot, as they almost in-
variably do. :

And when one of the young
men tells a beautiful young girl
got up to look dowdy: “Your face
is dirty, little mouse,” we know
at once which of the two whim-
sical plots is to follow.

This is the one about the waif
befriended by three romantic
young men who treat her as a
child, only to find to their im-
mense astonishment that, given
time, a new frock and star groom-
ing she will become a young lady.

In this particular sample Leslie
Caron is the waif, a bad-tempered
Mel Ferrer is the man she is §0-
ing to’ be slapped by and fall in
love with, and a puppet booth in
a travelling circus is the scene of
operations.

The childish Lili likes to talk
to Rerrer’s puppets, and her dia-
logues with them are incorporat-
ed into the act with great fin-
ancial success.

She doesn’t get on so well with
Ferrer himself. She calls him

“the angry man,” and wonders

why he’s always in a rage.

He’s supposed to be angry be-
cause he’s in love with her and
she’s infatuated with a married
magician. But my guess is that
much of- his asperity can be
ascribed to the natural wrath of
a good actor at having to speak
fake literary dialogue for a liv-
ing. ;

Despite the dialogue and the
self-conscious charm,
this film is very nearly carried off
by the real intelligence and ap-
peal of Leslie Caron, a young
French ballet dancer who starred
in An American in Paris, but here
dances only in two rather dread-

_ful dream sequences.

however, |

Madame Sun Yat-sen (centre) at the founding ceremonies of the
People’s Republic of China.

BOOKS

Madame Sun Yat-sen
tells story of China

A BOOK BY Madame Sun Yat-
sen, wife of the founder of the
first Chinese Republic and now a
vice-chairman of: the People’s
government, is an event.

For years Madame Sun Yat-sen
—who uses her maiden. name of
Soong Ching‘ling — lived under
surveillance by the police of her
brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek,
was.prevented from speaking and
had to confine herself to only oc-
casional articles, mostly appear-
ing in papers outside China.

Now these articles and later
speeches have been collected into
The Struggle for New China (ob-
tainable here at the People’s Co-
operative Bookstore, 337 ‘West
Pender Street, cloth cover, $1),
one of the most powerful appeals
to liberal-minded people that has
ever appeared.

* * *

THIS IS A book by a fighting
liberal who has been prepared to
learn and carry forward her be-
liefs.

Here is an authentic voice of
the Chinese people. It is more.
It is the voice of the people of
all Asia, especially of Asian wo-
men, which no one, of whatever

_ politics, who cares for the future

of the world can afford to ignore.

Madame Sun Yat-sen takes her
stand on the three principles put
forward by her husband for the
regeneration of China — “demo-
cracy, nationalism and the peo-
ple’s livelihood.”

But the problem which con-
fronted the Chinese revolution-
aries in the past, as it confronts
the people of Indochina, Korea
and Malaya most acutely today, is
how to win democracy.

Out of his bitter early failures
Sun Yat-sen drew up Three Poli-
cies which, as Madame Sun says,
“are the instruments by which the
three principles can be achieved.”

* * *

THESE POLICIES are to rely
on the workers and peasants, to.

cooperate with the Communist
party, and to ally China with the
Soviet Union.

No colonial people can achieve
its freedom and independence ex-
cept-through these policies, but
they extend much: wider than
that.

This book starts with the auth-
or’s vigorous reaffirmations of
her husband’s principles and poli-
cies in the dark days of the Kuo-
mintang betrayal of the Chinese
Revolution in 1927, splendid in
the confidence that ultimately the
common people of China would
win.

It concludes with the triumph
of the Revolution in 1949, looking
forward to the development of
China in friendship with the So-
viet Union and with an offer of
friendship, through the peace
movement to the American peo-
ple.

“To give life, to build, to en-
hance — these are the main mis-
sions in man’s life,” says Madam
Sun Yat-sen, “for these, peace is
the essential condition.”

And she writes proudly of the
New China: “We are a nation
where labor is honored.”

What a contrast, this rich sense
of life with her agonised appeals
against the slaughter of Chinese
patriots and democrats by dictat-
or Chiang Kai-shek, contained in
her writings of the early 1930s.

This is an immensely readable
book, deeply illuminating recent
Chinese history and the common
struggle of forward-looking peo-
ple.

When one finishes, one has had
a really liberal education, learn-
ing not only: about China, but
about how to struggle for a peace-
ful world and a democracy in
which labor, not exploitation, is
honored, which is the only real
kind of democracy. — ARTHUR
CLEGG. :

These are the children of the New China. —
PACIFIC TRIBUNE — JANUARY 29, 1954 — PAGE 8