THE CINEMA
" Leningrad Fights." At the Plaza.—" Natasha." At the Tatler.
" The War Against Mrs. Hadley." At the Empire.
THIS week's films provide an opportunity to compare two current styles of war-time film-making, each associated with a particular member of the United Nations. Let us consider first the two Russian films of the week. Leningrad Fights is half documentary, half newsreel, an assembly of scenes taken in and around Leningrad during the past year. The story is the story of last winter's siege, of an ordeal by fire and ice from which for many months there were three ways of escape—death by high-explosive, death by freezing, death by starvation. For a time the road and railway across the ice of Lake Ladoga enabled women and children to leave the city in trucks and wagons which had brought munitions to the front. Then the melting ice reaches the wheel-hubs and Leningrad is shut off again from the rest of Russia. By contrast Natasha is a fiction-film in which a Soviet girl saves the people of her village from the tortures of Nazi parachutists, becomes a nurse at the front and, after being wounded in an exchange of shots with German infantry, is visited in hospital by the lover whom she believed to be dead. The scenario is conventional enough to have reached Russia as packing-paper in a consignment of munitions from California, but however hackneyed the story may be its treatment has more in common with the horrors of Leningrad Fights than with the warm drawing-room philosophies of Hollywood at war. Seldom has so much cruel physical discomfort been thrown on the screen than is contained in these two Russian pictures. In Natasha there are no glamorous hospital wards; hospital tent is set up in the snow amongst burning homes and the craters from the latest dive-bombing raid. The wounded men are dirty and bad-tempered, the nurses' hair straggles from under their caps as they would waddle in the deep snow like ungainly, exhausted little bundles of clothes. Throughout this film and throughout Leningrad Fights the spectator is numbed by the ghastly picture of cold. In Leningrad all traffic is stopped ; the people draw through the streets on tiny home-made sledges the mummy-like bodies of sick or injured relatives • the water-supply has frozen and a hole has been bored through the ice of the river so that water can be fetched or clothes washed there out of doors in the bitter wind. In the background we see a coffin go slowly by on one of the ubiquitous dragging sledges. In a roofless tank factory the workmen are muffled up to the eyes even in front of their furnace, the leaping flames from which are set in opposition to the fires of destruction rag:n7. throughout the city. This is the
Russian picture of war ; we are spared no horror, but the horror serves only to throw into greater emphasis the heroism of the people who are prepared to suffer so much without yielding. The appeal is directly to the emotions.
America, with less experience in these matters, is also em- ploying a strongly emotional appeal in her propaganda. But whereas the Russians use realistic portrayals of the horrors and grim heroisms, Hollywood seems determined to put behind every mani- festation of war a halo of sentimentality. The War Against Mrs. Hadley is the story of a cultured Washington society woman who quarrels with her family and friends because they refuse to maintain in war-time the snobbish political and social conventions which she believes to be more important than war. Then her son becomes a hero, she receives a letter from President Roosevelt, and her selfishness vanishes at once. She faces up bravely and proudly to the horrors of the black-out, to first-aid classes, and to the agonies of not using the car. These are the only manifestations of war we are permitted to see in this film, and although Mrs. Hadley's story is a story of the civilian front the tendency to present our present problems as things to be solved simply by gentlemanly behaviour and a little self-sacrifice is a polite belief now cropping up in American films with alarming frequency. The War Against Mrs. Hadley is lifted out of the ruck by a brilliant performance in the name-part by Fay Bainter, but in spite of the superiority of its beautifully polished technique over that of the Russian films it cannot approach their emotional effect, which is based on a realistic rather than a sentimental conception of the war.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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