“A poignant, sensitively handled film about an impending divorce seen fron a child’s viewpoint, little Friend features a delicate, critically acclaimed performance by talented young Nova Pilbeam, making her film debut at the age of 14 (she was soon to appear in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, graduating to adult roles in Robert Stevenson’s Tudor Rose and Hitchcock’s Young and Innocent). In retrospected it is also a fascinating social document, transformed by the sharp eye of its emigré director, with its depiction of an english upper-class family (complete with crisp enunciation and chic fashions by Sciaparelli) fantasy elements (Fritz Kortner in a cameo as a pantomime giant who fills a theatre’s proscenium arch!), and, quite controversially for the time, an attempted suicide by gas (vhich prompted the banning of all such scenes in British and American commercial films for years afterwards). Today Little Friend is best remembered only by reputation, as the film which inspired Christopher Isherwood’s trenchant 146 short novel about film making, Prater Violet. Isherwood, who coscripted Little Friend with Margaret Kennedy (of Constant Nymph fame), drew upon his experiences working on Little Friend with Austrian émigré director Viertel, immortalising him in print as director Friedrich Bergmann, working on a romantic concoction for a fictional Imperial Bulldog Pictures. Roving director Berthold Viertel (1885-1953) made three films for Gaumont-British in England in the mid-1930s. Viertel began his career as a stage actor and director, making the transition to film in the early 1920s in Germany (he directed the haunting Kammerspiel Die Perucke, 1924). In 1928 he went to Hollywood, where his film included Seven Faces (1929), The Magnificent Lie (1931). A cultured, literate filmmaker, he was also a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. A friend of Murnau, Vierted co-scripted Four Devils and City Girl. There was a whole colony of émigrés working at Gaumont-British in the 1930s. The finely crafted Little Friend brought together the talents of cinematographer Gunther Krampf, designer Alfred Junge (Head of the Gaumont- British Art Department), and composer Ernst Toch. This screening provides a rare opportunity to savour Little Friend on its own considerable merits”.

(Catherine A. Surowiec)