WHITEWASH?
SIR,—About Under Ten Flags, a ridiculous film to spend paper on, but the epitome of a lot of current film notions: William Douglas Home, tireless apologist for his own absurdities, needs rio answer: he wrote the wretched thing, or by his own admission the English admiral's role, which even as good an actor as Charles Laughton could do little to save, the time I saw it, from shrieks of laughter and dis- gust; and anyone who could think that a film as obtuse and tasteless could contribute to international understanding is clearly beyond the reach of reason.
Ludovic Kennedy is another matter. I doubt if he's seen the film; but of me he has obviously worked up an image as a kind of latterday Madame Warp, mumbling and cursing as I knit shrouds for NATO admirals. 'Battles of long ago,' he calls them (he has a neat touch with misquotation), as if it was the American Civil War we were talking about and not here and now, living people, still live issues, above all films made at present. rn, not the one to bring these things up. I don't .go about with a broomstick looking for Nazi heads to crack; but I see film after film distorting, by softening and glamorising, this very recent and very terrible past, and, as a critic and as a person. I ask for it to stop. As for his smear : 'Germans, Nazis, Krauts, Roches, Huns,' he says, 'call them what she will, it is clear that Miss Quigly hates the lot of them.' It is purely his personal opinion that I loathe Germans, and nothing I ever said shows it: do I have to keep saying, in a paper like the Spectator, that I don't, that you can't, hate a whole nation? Krauts, Bodies, Hurts: 'Call them what she will,' Mr. Kennedy says, and uses ugly, emotive words of his own, words I have never used, wouldn't dream of using, and refuse to be saddled with, How dare he plant imaginary opinions and attitudes on me, and then liken them to anti-Semitism, one of the ugliest' of ancient and modern evils! 'Grubby' is the word he chooses : I would go farther : I call his way of arguing, through smear and insinua- tion, plain dirty.—Yours faithfully,
Tower Cottage, Fletching. Sussex
ISABEL QUIGLY
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