10 NOVEMBER 1944, Page 11

THE CINEMA "Adventures in Bukhara." At the Tatler. " The

Climax." At the Odeon.—" Spanish Earth." At the Academy. — " Ku Kan." At the London Pavilion.

Adventures in Bukhara is a film depending as Much for its effect on atmosphere as on situation. It was made in 1943 by the Soviet studios in Tashkent and here indeed is the Middle East. Though the story is set in the eighteenth century the scenes of street and bazaar give a completely convincing picture of people and period, and the eating of bowls of pilaff, the head shaving, the fortune- telling which we see depicted as amongst the normal daily activities of Bukhara's citizens are not the studio fabrications with which Hollywood pictures of the East have familiarised us. They belong to this place and these people. The story is of the gay adventures of Nasreddin, a Robin Hood of the Middle East who exposes and deflates the vanity of riches with a simple logic and who finds no difficulty in rescuing his bride from the Emir's harem. This kind of story stands or falls by its success in creating an appropriate setting for its fantastic adventures and this the film triumphantly does. The final result is a fairy tale come alive, a literary legend which has taken visual shape. Sverdlin, who plays the part of Nasreddin, is a comedian whose future performances may be awaited with high expectation. He has the mercurial and effer- vescent quality of the late Douglas Fairbanks, a first-rate sense of timing, and a very real sense of visual humour.

The success of this production from Tashkent suggests that the opening of studios otuside the established centres of film-making may well result in a much-needed transfusion of new vitality into the cinema and in the bringing to the screen of colourful idioms which have so far suffered only the misrepresentation and distortion of studios with a necessarily alien approach. Adventures in Bukhara is handicapped for popular distribution by its Russian dialogue for which the superimposed English titles are a poor substitute, but here, nevertheless, is a film which might be booked with good results by cinema-managers normally shy of foreign films.

To contrast with this success in the creation of an authentic atmosphere, let us consider The Climax. Here is a film which has been synthesized rather than created. A public exists for films of back-stage horror on the model of The Phantom of the Opera (the fact might provide a rich field for psychological research but it remains, nevertheless, a commercial fact) and aware of the market the producers of The Climax have gone painstakingly to work to assemble the required ingredients. Here is Susanna Foster as the young singer who is to make her debut and here is the sinister figure haunting the opera-house who is determined to prevent it. Here are also a pair of temperamental stars for comic relief, a little technicoloured stage spectacle and some grey make-up for the villain. For the latter role the film-makers have nailed their sadisVc colours firmly to the mast by choosing none other than our horrific friend, Mr. Boris Karloff. For a crowning touch (a touch of genius in the genre) it has been arranged that the villain shall be the ddctor officially accredited to the opera-house, which permits him to keep handy a formidable collection of surgical instruments.

I wonder whether material of this kind really represents a lesser public danger than the shots illustrating Nazi participation in Franco's Spanish rebellion which the censor ordered to be removed from Joris Iven's Spanish Earth now revived in London. Presum- ably there would today be no official objection to the re-insertion of the film's premature anti-Fascism. It is the character of the peasants in this moving tribute to the Republican cause which now means- more than the scenes of fighting or the somewhat self- consciously spare Hemingway commentary.

Ku Kan is a film about the resistance of China, equally moving but less polished. It is photographed in rather poor colour and accompanied by a commentary which sometimes becomes over- emotional. The most important sequence shows a daylight air- raid on Chungking. This contains some of the most spectacular air-raid scenes that have ever been photographed, but it is not the explosions and fires that remain in mind so much as the contrasts of life in Chungking. One gets from the film a sense of the jostling mixture of Chinese officialdom and peasant' customs. There are great, modern, steel-framed buildings being protected against fire by hand-driven pumps which went out of use in this country fifty years ago. And, as always in such films, there arc the inevitable pictures of simple people retaining their dignity ih the face of modern mechanised assaults which miht have come to them from

another world and another century. EDGAR ANSTEY.