Free Love Fifteen Page B

couple Theo guessed had come on the motor-bike and sidecar he’d seen parked outside. Vera, who knew as much about films as Rose did, poured tea from a Thermos and handed him the mug. As a newcomer he was given sugar-cubes and milk but told to bring his own next week. Like the others, he warmed his hands on the mug. An oil-heater was doing its best to take the chill off.
    Stone and Moss were younger, though not by that much, and Theo had met their sort when Fred had made him go to Sunday school once or twice and reckoned they’d come to argue as much as watch. He guessed pretty soon that Vera was only a member because of George and George was only there to work the projector. He sat beside the machine letting his smoke drift across the rays of light, making the picture even dimmer.
    Hazel switched out the overhead lamp, shaded since the blackout to light a small area directly below. Just before the picture came on, he saw her slip on her glasses, like she had in The Regent. While the French film was on, Stone and Moss kept snorting with laughter or tut-tutting as though something rude had been said, though the words underneath weren’t a bit funny so Theo reckoned these were among the huge mass of jokes he wouldn’t understand till he was older. After three years of French lessons with Artie Shaw, he found he could only understand the title:
Day Lifts Itself or Gets Up
but Mrs. Hampton suggested
Break of Day
. The picture quality was only a little better than he’d seen at kids’ birthday parties when they showed the
Keystone Kops
or
Mickey Mouse
; the sound boomed and crackled from a speaker beside the screen, decoding a track that was all vowels and sudden loud music and seemed to have been recorded in the North Baths. This didn’t matter much, though the jumps and slips and flickering did and the times when it all groaned to a halt and George had to get up and lace the next reel. This was a first for Theo but he easily read the titles, except when the white letters happened to be against a white part of the picture.
    When ‘Fin’ came on, the next word Theo understood, George caught the spinning reel and began rewinding.
    â€œWeird and wonderful,” he said.
    Mrs. Hampton took off her glasses and turned the light on.
    â€œIt was good to see that again,” Stone said, the Adam’s apple in his neck bobbing up and down like a ping-pong ball on a jet of water in a fairground.” I’m inclined to agree with Manvell that it’s Carné’s masterpiece.”
    â€œWhich is where I must take issue with both you and Mister Manvell,” Moss said, smiling and tugging at his brindled beard.” Though it may be lèse-majesté. For me it’s altogether too black-and-white.”
    Theo wondered how a film without technicolour could have been anything else.
    â€œWhere,” Moss went on, “one can’t help asking, are those greys? As it is, the innocent girl, the wicked women of the world, the inarticulate working-man caught between, the evil and perverted showman all seem mere humours, personifications of moral forces Carné wants to cast into a crucible –”
    â€œWhich is surely the whole point,” Stone broke in, “that these figures are no mere individuals but mythopeic archetypes.”
    â€œWhat did you think, Vera?” Mrs. Hampton asked.
    â€œWell, I wasn’t going to say anything but, since you ask, I’m not surprised France fell like a rotten apple if they’re all as depressed as that.”
    George smiled at her.
    â€œWell said, love. They got the moral fibre of a flock of geese.”
    â€œI don’t see this as an exposition of the shortcomings of The Third Republic,” Stone said, with a slight smile in Theo’s direction.
    â€œDon’t you?” Mrs. Hampton said, “I do. However wonderful it is as a film, I agree with Vera that it shows only too well the moral malaise France found