THE CINEMA " There's a Future in It " and
" And the Angels Sing." At the Plaza.—" Spring Song " and " Drive to the West." At the Tatler.--" Wuthering Heights." At the London Pavilion and
generally re-released. • .
THE programmes at the Plaza and the Tatler this week by chance provide a double contrast of Anglo-Saxon and Russian film-making. At each cinema the main film is a musical comedy in which the protagonists, seeking for a career, must choose between popular entertainment and more highbrow pursuits. Each shorter support- ing film is an official account of the War, one sponsored by the Soviet Government and the other by our own Ministry of Informa- tion. Drive to the West is a screen report by Red Army cameramen of the beginning of the last year's summer offensive. It consists almost exclusively of scenes photographed in the field and as the advancing Russian infantry and tanks roll back the borders of the Nazi salient at Orel we are in the presence of War itself. The brilliantly simple pattern of Soviet strategy is illustrated by animated maps so that each individual scene contributes more than its own moment of courage or horror. The joy of the rescued citizens of liberated towns and villages becomes a deeply moving climax to a paper plan conceived with cool assurance in dug-out headquarters. There's a Future In. It is a story not of the 'waging of war but of the contrasting and conflicting mental processes of those who must fight it on the one hand and, on the other, of those who must wait behind in impatience or exasperation. The M.o.I. has here tackled a difficult theme with courage and imagination and in my opinion the experiment has succeeded. The film is based on a piece of documentary fiction by E. M. Bates. It depicts in simple authentic terms a young bomber pilot who conceals by a casual manner, his hatred and fear of the shadow of death under which he lives ; it contrasts the love mixed with pity of a casual girl- friend (excellently played by Ann Dvorak) and the cautious dis- approval of her parents who see in him only a poor and uncertain prospect of a son-in-law. The contrast between the old morals of the suburban drawing room and the sharper' ethic of sudden death is truly made. The title of the original story, There's No Future In /t, implied that the future denied to so many of our Young airmen was a gift from them to an often ungrateful world •
and the theme is used in the film to throw an uncomfortable light upon many an armchair selfishness. The film is excellently made by Leslie Fenton and although the end drags a little and there are moments when it is solemn rather than serious, it does present an issue of the War which is too often and too easily neglected. Itt gay, chorus-singing airmen bringing to quiet country pubs their adolescent jargon and rituals are as real as the obstinately scurrying infantry of Drive to the West. Moreover, the British film repre- sents a facet not only of the War but of the potential conflicts of the post-war world, and it is a healthy sign that it should be pre- sented so boldly on our screens.
To return to the musical films. In And the Angels Sing Holly- wood shows us the four talented daughters of a small-town Ameri- can finally abandoning their ambitions as journalist, painter, com- poser and serious actress and succumbing to the seductions of cabaret where they finally appear as a singing sister act. Since Dorothy Lamour and Betty Hutton are of their number and the lowbrow seduction is personified by band-leader Fred MacMurray, the audience is at no point in doubt as to the girls' eventual pro- fessional destination. The film in fact treats it as something of joke that pretty young women should wish to do anything but sell their physical charms to the public on the most profitable basis Spring Song, in tackling a similar problem, is not so unkind to the exercise of the intellect. We have already seen ip this country a shortened version of this film. Ludmila Trelivkovskaya, an ex- tremely personable young Russian singer and actress, plays the part of a musical professor's daughter who risks parental wrath by choosing to sing in her young lover's operetta rather than interpret the works of the more venerable masters. Bach, himself, descends from the professor's picture frame to point the moral that light music can also be good music and domestic peace comes to the riven musical household. How much more thought and imagina- tion has gone into the Russian film than into the American! Whereas in Spring Song there is wit, satire and shrewd caricature from which neither highbrow nor lowbrow emerges unscathed (the young student swooning in ecstasy at the sound of Bach :s no more respected than the elephantine dance-steps of the over-fat revue star), in And the Angels Sing the jokes are all in the most primitive tradition of slapstick and double-doored misunderstanding. Russian musical films are these days reaching an extraordinarily high lev:4 of rich entertainment. Their simple but original observation forms a strange contrast with the hackneyed complexities of the Holly- wood plot. Spring Song can be recommended for its music as well as for its comedy, a claim which cannot always be made on behalf of its transatlantic rivals.
I was unfortunate enough to miss Wuthering Heights when it was first shown some years ago. Now that it is revived I went to see it with a keener anticipation than was altogether justified in the result. Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon both are excellent but a twist of the continuity which presents us with the solution of the melodrama before it is unravelled seems to me to saddle the film with an unfortunate dramatic shape. As in lane Eyre the psychological implications of the story find a physical manifestation which is often over-theatrical. Yet these are both films above the average which will repay a visit whilst reminding us that the com- mercial cinema still has a long way to go before it can claim to have mastered the problem of representing inner mood by outer
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