13 JANUARY 1950, Page 12

CONTEMPORARY ARTS

CINEMA

Task Force is a long conscientious record of the birth, growth and maturity of the aircraft carrier, and as a documentary, if not as a vehicle for Mr. Gary Cooper, it is impressive. Following Mr. Cooper's career in the United States Navy, we see, in 1921, a small group of about a dozen pilots endeavouring, in Heath Robinsonian planes, to land on the narrow deck of a converted collier, and from there we are taken into battle, first with the obdurate minds of Naval chiefs and finally with the Japanese. The air battles, save of course when pilots are photographed in the cockpits, are authentic newsreels, and they are as magnificent and as horrible as one could wish. impersonal as birds the planes fall to the guns in screaming curves ; they are winged and dive like plummets into the sea ; they arch up into the sky missing each other by inches ; they lay their lethal eggs as flames stream out in banners behind them. Beautiful battles they are, and one is appalled at finding them so.

Above all this picture, which is half-plain half-coloured, shows the amazing complexity of modern warfare. The aircraft carrier seems to be one vast instrument panel with humans serving it obsequiously, their eyes and ears waiting upon its slightest whim. Only in the air does man master the machine and bend it to his will, so it is into the air that our hearts go, much as we may admire the men on the knobs. Mr. Gary Cooper is modest and looks superb, and Miss Jane Wyatt makes wifely noises with discretion, but the dialogue is such that one is impatient to return to active service, to the talk of the guns, the tune of the propellers * * There are two ways of enjoying the new Tarzan picture. Either one car approach it as a little child, in which case the leanings from bough to bough, the chimpanzees, the gorgeous girls hidden in the heart of a mountain sipping their aperitifs of youth-perpetuating water, the elephants and the adventures can be taken unquestioned ;

• or else one can approach it in a mood of sophisticated levity. In each case a lot of good clean fun can he had. As someone who finds It difficult to be juvenile on a cold January morning when the herring is hardly digested and sleep barely unravelled, I found particular pleasure in the dialogue, which is of the delicate suburban type, and in the manners and modes of jungle life. These latter are, today, most so/tyre, luncheon being served at small tables, on the

terrace as it were, to the accompaniment of decorous gossip. I laughed heartily all through this film, but on mature reflection I feel that the right way to visit it is with a child. A little infectious simplicity, a jot of vicarious wonder, is a sounder basis for enjoy- ment than destructive mirth. By the way, Tarzan is played by Mr. Lex Barker, and he is just as he should be, beautiful and dumb.

Only soothsayers and psychiatrists can tell why Sand has been called Sand, for there is not one particle of it blowing in any direction whatsoever across the still green meadows and warm rocky crags of this Californian tribute to the horse. The film is devoted entirely to a magnificent red stallion which escapes from a train in which it is travelling, and goes wild. Mr. Mark Stevens, Mr. Rory Calhoun and Miss Coleen Gray lay many plans to catch it, mostly I may say of a biological, or at any rate a romantic, nature, and in the end this cavorting splendid-looking animal is persuaded to renounce the prairie for the stable. The scenery is superb—the film, by the way, is in Technicolor—and the lakes, woods and mountains basking in the sun or, alternatively, glowing in the moon gave me a sudden, terrible yearning to be done with Regent Street for ever. Never- theless, though the landscapes are disturbingly beautiful and the actors pleasant enough people, this is really a film for horses.

VIRGINIA GRAHAM.