THE CINEMA
The Gentle Sex is a story of life in the A.T.S., compered by Mr. Leslie Howard often in the spirit of the penny peep-show, his com-
mentary at other times suggesting a sentimental old gentleman dis- cussing the " fair sex " over a glass of port in his club. Yet when Mr. Howard is silent the film does succeed in giving us a lot of
welcome facts and feelings about women in uniform. We begin in a London railway terminus, where Mr. Howard selects from the crowd (unashamedly on grounds of personal appearance) a group of young actresses who are about to join the A.T.S. We are not supposed to know they are actresses, and, in fact, we soon find they are expected to play the parts of ordinary A.T.S. personnel from a variety of walks of life—a difficult task in which they succeed as well as the trailing clouds of glamour from their previous imper- sonations will permit. We watch these girls through training up to the time when they can drive their trucks and man their anti-aircraft predictors under fire like real soldiers ; we see their several reactions to the new personal demands of dormitory, drill-square and mess ; we see communal emotional needs conflicting with the demands of duty and brave attempts to keep alive the less martial qualities of a woman's world. Mr. Howard has made up for the deficiencies of his interludes of commentary by excellent direction and he has been nobly supported by his cast. Lilli Palmer has given the film an extra dimension of intelligence and sensitivity (albeit theatrical rather than documentary) by her impersonation of a Czech recruit, and Joan Gates and Rosamund John have done their best to bring the film down from the romantic fancies of the studio to the facts of A.T.S. life and to match in authenticity the " real " personnel whose homely but purposeful faces sometimes cut rwilllessly through the fiction. In spite of the qualities of the film—Tand there is nothing flamboyant about it—one is left with an uncomfortable feeling that there are more irksome and less spectacular burdens to be borne in the women's services than manning a predictor in an air-raid or driving a lorry for long exhausting hours to catch a convoy. The cooks, clerks and waitresses (perhaps the real heroines) get scarcely a mention in the film. The greatest fault of all in what remains a very worth-while job is the basic assumption that women have never before undertaken hard, dangerous work. If Mr. Howard is not torn limb from limb by working-class housewives for this piece of middle-class myopia he will scarcely survive the attentions of the factory girls in the next industrial town he may visit.
Keeper of the Flame is a film in which nobody wears a uniform and which yet seems to me to have more important things to say about the war than any of our military epics. This in spite of its shameless borrowing of many ideas from Citizen Kane and in spite, too, of a most stilted performance by Katherine Hepburn. It is the story of how a great national hero is discovered by a con- scientious biographer (beautifully played by Spencer Tracy) to have been in fact a dangerous crypto-fascist who sought to exploit the people who looked up to him. It is a most timely and most out- spoken attack on the " great leader " myth and the worship of personal power which are at the root of so many of our troubles.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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