The programme for the sixteen days of this year’s Cannes Festival, the seventeenth of the series, was considerably more uneven than it has been for several years past and this, it seemed to me, made it more than usually interesting for the serious student of cinema. With three or four exceptions the great names were absent, and the number of predictable smash hits was surprisingly limited when one first looked at the complete list of entries. But as the brilliantly sunny days passed, it became increasingly evident how stimulating was the great proportion of work by very young or inexperienced directors, and one became used to seeing nervous young men sitting behind the microphone at the post-performance press conferences, waiting to be thrown to the wolves. So nervous were some of them, in fact, that even the journalistic wolves relented sufficiently to temper their bite to the shorn lambs.

Apart from one or two quite outstanding pictures like Jacques Demy’s Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, which in the event won the Grand Prix outright and shared the Catholic prize, or Pietro Germi’s Seduced and Abandoned—not at all what you might expect from its title—you could almost divide the entries into films with very interesting ideas made by directors with insufficient experience to make the most of their material; and films made by experienced directors trying to put over insufficient material by means of accomplished technique.

For once, I found myself wholly on the side of the first category, many of which provided extremely rewarding viewing. One that I liked almost the best, though I was in a minority here, was a Swedish film made by a young man called Bo Widerberg; Kvarteret Korpen was translated as Raven’s End, the name of an industrial quarter outside Stockholm.