6 APRIL 1944, Page 11

THE CINEMA

SHOWING at the Taller is The Battle of the Ukraine, a film more publicised for its cuts than for its content. The commercial exploita- tion of horror for its own sake in such films as The Phantom of the Opera is not discouraged by the British censors, but scenes of horror which help to report the facts of war on the Eastern front are apparently considered unsuitable for us to see. What remains, however, is striking enough in itself. Under the supervision of Dovzhenko, once primarily famous as a director of lyrical films, front-line material has been assembled into a rounded report of the scale, speed and horrifying consequences of Nazi invasion and re- treat in the Ukraine. The scenes of frantic artillery bombardment and of the following irresistible advance of Soviet tanks and infantry have some of the cumulative effect of Desert Victory, though in this case it is a war fought amongst enormous grotesque sunflowers which loom and nod through the battle like the inventions of a clown- ng surrealist. The details which remain in the mind, as always in these films, are the spontaneous human gestures, the unconscious reactions to mental strain. Here a woman reciting to the camera an account of Nazi atrocities is more eloquent with the ceaselessly writhing fingers in her lap than in her halting phrases; a wounded man moving back from the line looks towards the camera without comprehension or interest ; infantrymen following a tank into the enemy line of fire send burst after burst of bullets into the

smoke ahead as a precautionary measure which appears to threaten friend and foe alike, so bunched together are the advancing troops. We see the guerillas return to their barren, blasted lands while the soldiers press on with an almost inhuman singleness of purpose. By contrast, captured Nazi shots seem to show the enemy methodical, even mechanical in the repetition of carefully rehearsed movements, hopelessly opposing determination with cunning.

Soviet film-makers have never believed that films must be romantic and pretty in order to be entertaining. The influence of the realist tradition in Russian literature is as apparent in such topical docu- mentaries as The Battle of the Ukraine as in My Universities, that magnificent biography of Maxim Gorky. In the case of neither film is the resultant drama soothing fare for the squeamish, but even the squeamish, after viewing Jack London, will agree that the oppo- site approach, the non-realistic, may fail to be dramatic at all. Jack London was a writer and a social reformer whose violent life and picaresque habits presented similar problems to those confronting the makers of the Gorky film. Yet what has 7ack London to show

which is comparable with My Universities? There are a few minutes of fighting on the deck of a seal-hunting schooner when Michael O'Shea shows signs of measuring up to the same role, but it is not long before this promising but miscast young actor has developed a wave in his hair and is behaving like a genteel writer from Greenwich Village rather than a hard-drinking rolling-stone from the canning factories. The idea of using an unfamiliar actor was good (does the similar course followed in Bernadette mean that Hollywood is at long last finding the star system an embarrassment?) but the episodes chosen for filming are too fragmentary and lacking in action whilst the film, finally peters out into a ludicrously unreal