Tragedies based on renunciation have been rare enough on the American screen, where happy ends must always be peeping around the corner. And when the American films have turned to tragedies, they have seldom been without wild-eyed women given to clock-wise or counter-clockwise movements of the arms.

The screen has hardly seen before now a story of renunciation so restrained and so genuine as "Zwei Menschen." In it, a theme that one might think impossible to make convincing has been told simply and with great sweetness.

There is young Count Enna of the Tyrol who lives in the schloss on the hill and there is an inn-keeper's daughter who lives in the valley below. The boy is no stiff-necked nobleman; he goes roaming the fields with the girl beside him; and in their lovemaking this pair is as pleasant to see as the Tyrolian Alps that surround them. Though for generations the youngest son of the house of Enna has served the Church, this boy in the feathered cap only laughs at family tradition and says he was never made to be a priest. But one day, when the boy Rochus is in danger, his mother vows to the Virgin that she will make him a priest. Soon after this she dies; and Rochus feels obliged to redeem her pledge. Perplexed and without faith, he journeys to Rome. He feels there the overpowering force of the Catholic Church to the extent of pledging his life to her service, though he can never forget his love. Later, he is sent back to the hamlet that was his home and is expected to look upon the girl he was to marry with the saber eyes of a priest and not with the eyes of a lover.

It would have been easy for the director to make the love incidents into an over-luscious and trivial idyll, but instead he has managed to give them a distinct epic quality. Similarly, he might have reduced the religious emotion to the common denominator of funeral-parlor music and rapt faces photographed through gauze. Instead, the impressive pictures of St. Peter's and the deep chanting of the choir are allowed to tell their own story without sugar coating. This reviewer has never seen such an authentic setting-forth in a film of the hypnotic power of the Church of Rome. Yet there is no attempt to proselyte the audience, to make it feel that devotion to the church is better than the love of a boy and a girl. There is no gratuitous singing of an angel choir to cheer this heartbroken boy in a priest's robe as he goes walking on his way alone.