Spellbound

THE attitude of the Catholic Church toI wards Spiritualism was well summed up in Mgr. Robert Hugh Benson's vivid novel The Necromancers. He did not condemn it as a fraud nor yet deny that there might be something in it. What he did say was that frauds among the Spiritualists exist and that the Church is wise in telling her children to " keep away from this beast—for it is dangerous."
Now a film based on the novel has been
made under the title Spellbound. It has not the " drive " of the book. It seemed to me that the subject was being treated almost too gingerly and as though the director were all too conscious of its controversial nature. True. we are shown a seance—in which materialisation takes place and which ends in a crash and a scream. And we RTC also shown (thanks to a clever bit of screen work by Frederick Leister) what an unscrupulous ..medium " can do with plastic human material. But vitality is lacking.
This is the frame on which the plot is built : A young Cambridge undergraduate falls in love with a shop-keeper's daughter. She dies and he seeks the help of the Spiritualists in order to " get over " to her. The girl materialises at the seance and the
boy temporarily loses his reason, He recovers after Vera Lindsay (an actress who must forget her stage technique if she is to make good in films) has struggled with the evil spirit that has possessed him. Hay Petrie plays the part of a Chestertonian type of theological lecturer who has dabbled in spiritualism and found it a poisoned pool. An untidy little figure in a shapeless overcoat and firmly attached to his umbrella, he dominates eyery sequence in which he appears.
Derek Farr as the young man who tries to " get through " to the dead, has an easy technique that should help him on the way to screen success. Odd bits of Trish philosophy mixed with humour lighten up the story and are dispensed by W. G. Fay as a gardener.
Hanncn Swaffer, an avowed Spiritualist, appears in a prologue in which he says it has yet to be proved that Spiritualism has ever sent anyone mad.
G. C.
London Pavilion