The only thing is that this youngster has a fondness for the symbols of death-a fondness in which her new companion encourages and comforts her by killing other animals and burying them, with ceremonials, beside the grave of her dog.
Clement, who directed and helped to write the script with Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost from an original screen story by François Boyer, has fused a powerful drama that cuts a wide swath through the fields of man's ripe hopes and symbolizes the frustration that many Europeans must feel about war.For the little girl of this story is a pitiful orphan of the war-a child who has seen her two parents and her little dog killed on the road while they were fleeing from the oncoming Germans and has found sanctuary in a peasant home and in the wonderfully sympathetic companionship of a slightly older peasant boy. And her immediate world, as we see it, is mostly that of a French peasant's farm.But out of these plain and modest elements, M. The towering symbol of the war's vast devastation is one little 5-year-old girl. For "Forbidden Games" is a brilliant and devastating drama of the tragic frailties of men, clear and uncorrupted by sentimentality or dogmatism in its candid view of life.As "Grand Illusion" found its area for comment upon the irony of war outside the actual range of warfare-it was about war prisoners, you may recall-this film finds its area for comment upon the damage that has been done to humankind in the seemingly innocent realm of farmers and children in the undisturbed countryside. But now that the film has been exhibited and its qualities revealed on this side, it may be reported confidently that the excitement is not only understandable but entirely justified. And, finally, it has been lambasted (as was inevitable) by certain elements abroad as a vicious and unfair picture of the peasantry of France.All of this rambling excitement may have sounded excessive over here, especially in the light of some confusions at previous European festivals. For another, it almost got a fast brush at the subsequent Venice Festival, on the ground that it wasn't eligible because it already had been shown at Cannes-and then, when it was accepted, it won the Venice Grand Prize. For one thing, the film stirred howling protests last spring from visiting critics after a special screening at the Cannes Film Festival because it had not been selected as an official entry of France.
THE FORBIDDEN GAME MOVIE PROFESSIONAL
It is Rene Clement's "Forbidden Games" ("Jeux Interdits").A great deal of professional excitement was aroused in Europe by this film, and some of that bubbling excitement had been transmitted over here. Such a film came along yesterday to the Little Carnegie.
It had been the vague hope of many that the French would eventually come through with a film which would boom such shattering comment upon the tragedy and irony of World War II as their memorable "Grand Illusion" did for World War I.
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