ME CINEMA
WHEN the adventures of Melbourne Jones Were first reported in the Press the narrative already displayed most of the attributes of a first-rate film-scenario. Pitted against the advancing German Army and the chaos of the French collapse was the obstinacy of a British engineer battling against a flood of refugees in an attempt to prevent precious machinery from falling into enemy hands. Here was an epic, one-man fight against long odds. When advance information revealed that Melbourne Jones himself was not to appear in The Foreman Went to France, and Mr. Tommy Trinder's name was linked with the film, we may be forgiven for having felt qualms about the casting. It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that Tommy Trinder was to provide the conventional measure of comic relief in a story which would become false as soon as it became conventional. The finished film allays all our anxieties on this score. Mr. Trinder, as a cockney soldier who puts his lorry at the disposal of the foreman, is the backbone of the film. Missing no opportunity for a gag, he contributes a movingly realistic portrait of the British soldier for whom the direst peril is raw material for humour. Clifford Evans as the foreman is somewhat les, satis- factory, a little too genteel to have come out of a workshop. The dive-bombing and machine-gunning attacks on roads jammed with refugees are brilliantly re-enacted. There is a nicely played scene in which Tommy Trinder tries to cheer a group of children who have just watched some of their number killed, and we see the frozen faces slowly thaw before the unconquerable Trinder ab- surdities. The Foreman Went to France makes a number of healthy attacks on official obstructionism and red-tape manipulation 1-ere at home, and upon the traitorous role of French capitalism. This film is first-rate propaganda because it establishes a link between battle- dress and overalls, and reminds us that in any war in which the factories are in the front-line the British engineer, if he is given his head, is very likely to come out on top.
The power of The Foreman Went to France derives from a simple, direct and credible narrative and from a pleasant purity of approach in its handling. Reap the Wild Wind—the latest Cecil B. de Mille epic—makes its bid for box-office favour with an exactly opposite approach yet with equal prospects of success. The de Mille films have always appeared to be the product of a peculiar process of synthesis which aims to combine within one film all the more sensational screen elements. Reap the Wild Wind is a story of Key West in 1840, and of the local wreckers whose violent rivalry in salvaging cargoes from the treacherous Florida K.eys led to villainy of the blackest order. The film (in Technicolor) is photographed, acted, directed and edited with a kind of automatic precision, a cold accuracy which takes little account of people, but only of the melodramatic situations in which they may be involved. So we have brutal fights, shipwrecks, and a horrifying battle with a giant squid, contrasted with spectacular glimpses of the magnificence of Charleston society. The whole thing is a curious mixture of the historic pageant, the three-ring circus, and the Chamber of Horrors,
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