CINEMA
The Red Beret. (Empire.)—Always a Bride. (Odeon, Marble Arch.) WHEN The Red Beret received its advance publicity a scream of anger emerged from thousands of British mouths because Alan Ladd, an American, was to be its protagonist. The First Airborne Division hold, rightly enough, a unique place both in our hearts and our history, and it was felt that having a foreign hero casts a slur on British paratroops whereas all it does is to cast one on our actors, none of whom, it seems, are magnetic personalities in the States. However, to keep both sides happy, Alan Ladd plays the part of an American pretending to be a Canadian, an involved status which has called for much ingenuity from Sy Bartlett, the adaptor of
Hilary St. George Saunders' book. Apart from the complexities of Mr. Ladd's life story the film is a straightforward account of the training of a small group of parachutists and their ultimate missions into enemy territory. It is ably directed by Terence Young and finely acted by a large cast, but .strangely enough, although the characters are clearly defined and the action sequences exciting, the film is not the stirring one you might expect. Unless exquisitely handled, the undramatic, faintly humorous attitude we adopt in times of stress has a way of infecting an audience, and when to this phlegmatic atmosphere Mr. Ladd, ace of poker faces, is added, it is hdrd, unless there is a touch of genius about the place, for the emotions to thaw out.
Still, this is an interesting, well-balanced picture, and deserving more than honourable mention are Leo Genn as a Major and Harry Andrews as a R.S.M. Both these actors invest stereotyped parts with originality. Romance comes in the shape of Susan Stephen and she has a hard row to hoe inasmuch as she is asked to be one of those heroines whose love affairs are conducted on acidulated lines. Love, films seem to think, is nourished by tart speaking and is all the sweeter for being heavily disguised as hate. It is a very tiresome theory. Tiresome too is the Empire's new stereo- phonic device whereby disembodied voices boom out from every corner save the expected.
Always a Bride, wril1;n by Ralph Smart and Peter Jones and directed by the former, is a delightful comedy poised on the brink of but never quite falling into whimsy. It is one of those fantasies dear to our hearts in which crime, though not actually allowed to pay, is shown to be an attractive gentlemanlike pursuit, all fun and fine manners, as gay as it is amoral. Of its type it is excellent and needless to say that most subtle of all comedians Ronald Squire is splendid in the leading role. He it is who, with his daughter Peggy Cummins posing, as his young bride, sweeps 'majestically into the larger Riviera hotels and having been ensconced in the honeymoon suite deserts, his soi-disant wife in the night. Feigning grief and pleading destitution Miss Cummins is given large sums of money by sympathetic fellow guests and leaves to join her father in another gullible town. Miss Cummins, though she still persists in looking fourteen, is excellent within her limitations, and as her admirer, a young Treasury official who is ostracised by his compatriots, Terence Morgan is almost too charming. Charles Goldner is superb, James Hayter a joy, and the rest of a talented cast take the many oppor- tunities offered them to be amusing. As for Mr. Squire, so courteous and suave, so radiantly happy whether selling hotels he does not own or going to the Monte Carlo prison—of which he has the pleasantest recollections—as for this master of the light fantastic, he is perfect.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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