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