MOVIEGOER

When Jean Renoir, the noted French director, left Hollywood recently to begin work in the reconstructed studios of Paris, he remarked that in America, "they go to the theatre to see people, not ideas." "Mr. Emmanuel," an expert British film of German atrocity, pays primary attention to people but gives ideas more than the passing nod that one generally finds in the art-starved cinema of the United States.

The title character is an old English Jew who ventures into the anti-Semitic Germany of 1938 in search of a twelve-year-old refugee's missing mother. On the way he finds himself framed on a murder charge, dragged from bed by the Gestapo, and cast into a Nazi prison. Help comes from a British night club singer who is the toast of Berlin and has no little influence with the military bigwigs of the hour. It is an engrossing story of international adventure that banks on neither unique turns of plot nor an overdose of suspense, but on sensitive personality portrayal and credible treatment.

Felix Aylmer plays Mr. Emmanuel with wise dignity, and leaves the feeling that no one else could quite fill the bill. His performance blends with the soft European beauty of Greta Gynt and the calm, leisurely pacing characteristic of English films to create an extremely satisfying impression of finished artistry. There is fidelity of characterization; unlike American screen women, who are invariably trim, several of the female leads are frankly heavy. There are glimpses of Goering and Himmler that ring very true, and desperate expressions on the faces of tortured Jews which tell the whole miserable story of persecution. "Mr. Emmanuel" goes into grim Nazi dungeons and glittering Nazi society with equal confidence and conviction. ssh.