Sta,--May a long-time admirer of Isabel Quigly's film reviews get
into the act?
Mr. William Douglas. Home, one of the script- writers of Under Ten Flags, disposes of himself with a final sentence to his letter which for sheer virtu- osity of idiocy must surely outperform his most successful stage farces: Finally, from the purely progressive angle, it is sad to think that, when film companies are at last making international films as a contribution to national understanding, their efforts (unless they have already been censored by Colonel Blimp) arc likely to receive an insensitive re- action from your critic.
To choose only one morsel at random, any person over the, age of competence who has had any first- hand experience whatsoever of the commercial film industry and can write the phrase I italicised, de- serves high congratulations for preserving such a sense of innocence in a sinful age. Ludovic Kennedy's letter on the same subject is not idiotic.. It is unbearably smug and obtuse. By comparison I find Mr. Home's views on why pictures are made positively charming. 'If Miss Quigly wants to go on fighting battles along ago. ...' In equating 1945 with 'long ago,' I fear Mr. Kennedy uses the time continuum not of the concentration camp but of the Test match.
Mr. Kennedy then proceeds to beat Miss Quigly over the head for saying that the Germans who served Hitler 'weren't human beings.' Come off it, Lud ol' sock, we know you can read because we've seen you do it on the telly. Miss Quigly never said it. She was clear and firm in rendering a distinction between Nazis and Germans, possibly too firm.
It is Ludovic Kennedy, and not your reviewer, who insists on blurring the difference; all well and good, if Miss Quigly is not, I am prepared to go down that road with him. In any event, his get-out that 'Both [anti-Germanism and anti-Semitism] seem to me to be the opposite sides of the same very grubby coin,' is almost a lour de force of getting away with murder. Pun intended.—Yours faithfully,
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