CINEMA
"The Happiest Days of Your Life." (Carlton.)---,, When Willie Comes Marching Home." (Leicester Sguare.)--,, Black Magic." (London Pavilion.) • IT would be permissible to view with some trepidation a film concerning the unexpected billeting of a girls' school in a boys' school, but The Happiest Days of Your Life misses, on every occasion, the obvious pitfalls. It is, of course, fun at its most British, for in no country but ours is coeducation considered to be a demoralising and unsalubrious business. So we have Miss Margaret Rutherford, more like a flustered battle charger than ever, arranging with the lugubrious and outraged Mr. Alistair Sim to hide the boys when the girls' parents come visiting, and to hide the girls from the school governors. That both these suspicious bodies of persons arrive at the same time calls for highly organised ingenuity, and I, for one, delighted in every minute of it. The circumstances may be idiotic, but Messrs. Frank Launder and John Dighton balance the lunacy with pungent pedagogic dialogue, and the farcical side though resplendently rampant, never gets out of hand. Supporting Mr. Sim and Miss Rutherford in the exercise of subterfuge are Miss Joyce Grenfell, who gives a brilliant interpretation of a down- trodden (in more ways than one) games mistress, Mr. Guy Middleton, Mr. Richard Wattis and Miss Muriel Aked. Certainly one of the happiest films of my life.
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When Willie Comes Marching Home purports to be a satire on American war pictures, and it does, at moments, achieve the satirical quite admirably. Sometimes, however, it forgets to exaggerate sufficiently the absurdities of Hollywood warfare, and, meaning to mock, remains to pray. In other words it comes perilously near to being another American war picture. Still, it is amusing and at times thrusts a brilliantly pointed needle into the balloon of hero-worshipping bunkum. Mr. Dan Dailey is the first man in Punxatawney to enlist in the Army, and the resulting celebrations are hair-raising. He leaves his native town bannered and banded, only to be posted back there in a few weeks. He remains in Punxatawney for another two years, and the town gets heartily sick of him. Eventually he goes on a mission which embraces France, England, the Maquis, secret maps of rocket sites, a para- chute descent and goodness knows what all, undertaken, for the most part, while drunk. It takes exactly four days, and at the end of them he is back in Punxatawney ! A film full of good explosive ideas, some of which have misfired.
" My very best to the Baroness," says Dr Mesmer on taking leave of a patient who has been healed of the ague by the great magnetic eyes of Dr. Cagliostro. Behind these eyes, that is when they are not detached and floating by themselves across the screen, is Mr. Orson Welles, but not even his hypnotic skill can save Black Magic from being an hilariously bad film. As an example of what Hollywood can do with the Court of Louis XV1—the incongruous dialogue coupled with all the Piddington trimmings— this picture is nothing short of divine. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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