THE CINEMA
"The Next of Kin." At the Carlton and the London Pavilion.
WITHIN the narrow limits of weekly praise and blame it is easy to lose sight of the full measure of the film's accomplishment. To remind us of it we have at the head of the week's entertainment a film which has all the excitement and immediacy of a murder on your doorstep and which was produced solely to carry an item of instruction to Army personnel. The arrival upon West End screens of an instructional film (that honest relation of the glamorous family) is a reminder of a growing world of film-making and distribution which has its vigorous existence beyond the cinemas. Outside the plush palaces the propaganda and instructional film is building its own circuits of shows and audiences. The town and village hall, the civil defence depot, the workers' hostel all are using and demanding films. Film shows at the meal break have become so much a part of the social life of some factories that the Films Division of the Mmistry of Information has launched a screen periodical of its own—a film magazine called Worker to War Front, commentated by Colin Wills, with sequences ranging from the spinning of spiders'-webs for gunsights to advice on how to organise ration-buying for war-workers. This film journal will be regularly incorporated in factory programmes to embody lighter or shorter items than normally are appropriate to documentary production and will give these non-theatrical programmes a theatrical variety of interest. Besides the extra-theatrical work of Government depart- ments there are plenty of examples of non-official initiative. Last week-end Dr. Julian Huxley attended a meeting of the London .Scientific Film Society to peak a personal commentary to a remark- able zoological film, Galapagos, made by the Dartington Hall Film Unit. The recent growth, astonishing in war-time, of the scientific film society movement reflects a growing consciousness of the existence of science as a social force which must be directed in the public interest and which can be interpreted by the film. The documentary film, the film of propaganda and instruction are mobilised for the war effort, and The Next of Kin is an example— though scarcely representative of what is being done. This War Office film was clearly a very expensive production both in money and—more important these days—in production time, but by no means all of the studio frills prove inappropriate to the serious purpose of the film. The moral is that careless talk loses lives, and The Next of Kin shows how a special landing force attacking an objective on the French coast is almost annihilated because a leakage of information has enabled the enemy to prepare his defence. The climax of the film is magnificently done. The technical accuracy with which the operation has been staged obviously derives from the need to satisfy the professionally knowledgeable audience for which the film was originally designed. The purpose was not primarily to entertain and the result is entertainment of the highest order. This is real war. The actors are submerged and forgotten in a body of men doing their job and revealing in expert comment their waning hope of survival. Earlier in the film we are nearer to studio convention : the sets and the stars shine with the light of romance and our intelligence service might perhaps have contributed the true professional flavour of spying as well as that of spy-catching. The film, however, possesses throughout a hard case of true behaviour, and the actors, influenced no doubt by the sobering proximity of the rank and file of the Worcestershire Regiment, have served their purpose nobly. Let us hope that it will occur to our film purveyors that there is a public market for realism in addition to this new customer in Whitehall. The Next of Kin owes its success firstly to the fact that it was made accurately to the measure of a propaganda purpose instead of in conformity with the rites and superstitions of the box-office myth, and secondly to the superb craftsmanship of director Thorold Dickinson. Watch how surely his camera moves, how precisely his scenes dovetail into his editing plan. When he makes his next film—whether for private or public showing—he must break still further away from the old studio taboos. After all there do exist more credible causes of treason than the one chosen in the film—a craving for cocaine. And why not go the whole propaganda hog and have the operation fail com-
pletely instead of arranging that in spite of Nazi fore-knowledge the objectives are reached and destroyed? Nevertheless I believe that this film will help to stop dangerous gossip both in the Army, for which it was made, and amongst the general public. No one who sees the final sequences, with the bloody realism of the hand-to- hand fighting and the circle of horrifyingly unexpected Nazi tanks, artillery and dive-bombers closing in on the trapped and dis- appointed men, will be inclined to forget that modern tactics depend on surprise, and surprise depends on silence. EDGAR ANSTEY.
Previous page
