rHE CINEMA
" The Spoilers." At the Leicester Square.—" Flying Fortress " At Warner's and the Empire.—" The Defeat of the Germans Near Moscow." At the Astoria, Charing Cross Road "Anglo-Soviet Alliance." Generally released in the Newsreels.
How long does it take for a period in history to develop in its literature (and nowadays in films) types of people to represent the life and legends of the time? A new screen version of The Spoilers comes to remind us that for Alaska's gold-rushing nineteen-hundreds the types have firmly crystallised. Though the actors may have changed (with William Farnum linking us with the golden age of the Western in a part appropriate to his years), the characterisations of Rex Beach's novel are now a permanent part of American tradition. Perhaps Richard Barthelmess as Broncho looks upon his unattainable mistress with somewhat too subtle a longing, and before sending him back to her Faro tables, saloon-keeping Marlene Dietrich may pause for just a second longer than the blood and thunder of the tale requires but John Wayne, Randolph Scott, and Harry Carey are proudly pre-Freud and ready to fight for their gold from saloon to court-room and back again. These were lush, lawless days, and though the characterisations are superficial, they are at any rate in terms of flesh and blood, and appropriate to a time When those two properties of the human organism were of some significance.
It is a pity that the protagonists of our current war films are not equally in time with the spirit of the day. Flying Fortress is anaemic almost to the point of complete inanition. There is, it is
true, a kind of antiseptic purity about some of the technical detail of the substratosphere raid on Berlin, and there is a taxi- driver who, when asked to go to the East-End at the height of a London air-raid, says, " 'Spose I might as well get it down there as up here "—but the men and the women of the film are for the most part a pale and puny crew, completely barren of those " strange oaths and modern instances " which were once regarded as a part of the make-up of the soldier. The actors are not to be blamed. There is evidence that Carla Lehmann and Richard Greene deserve better opportunities than are provided by this hackneyed script of play-boy turned hero, and girl-reporter comforting bombed slum- dweller. The whole cause of the trouble is that no one has tried seriously and hard enough in feature films to record the charac- teristics of the mood in which people are fighting this war. The half-hearted attempts that are made tend to begin and end in fashionable drawing-rooms with the lower orders proving their heroism and humanity by providing comic relief in the intervals. If men and women fighting for gold in Alaska can be portrayed as human beings, surely in our present circumstances we must have mobilised some special dignity and wealth of spirit which can be used on the screen to give life to the story of today.
The feature film should be using its opportunities for intimate characterisation to support the broad general picture of modem war which is provided by such films as The Defeat of the Germans Near Moscow. This film of the Russian winter offensive is spectacular in its scenes of infantry and tanks advancing under fire, of villagers moved to hysterical tears by their liberators, of horrifying piles of bodies tortured by the retreating Nazis. The battle is huge, and the individual soldier, whether grimly advancing, wounded, or dead, cannot but seem a tiny insignificant particle in a mechanical mael- strom which leaves only ruin behind it.
It has fallen to the lot of the R.A.F. Film Unit to provide for the newsreels the most revealing film of the war, and the best record of an historic meeting that has ever been filmed. The scenes are of the arrival of M. Molotov and of the signing of the Anglo-Soviet Alliance. The unposed pictures are packed with fascinating detail—M. Maisky is quietly providing M. Molotov with a running translation of Mr. Eden's speech when an alert young Russian quickly lowers his head between theirs to add a remark of correction, guidance or elucidation ; M. Maisky and Mr. Eden each insists that the other join M. Molotov on the back seat of a car, and the problem is finally solved by the three of them sitting together in happy discomfort. Mr. Eden makes no attempt to conceal his pleasure at every detail of the occasion, and from a hundred little details of behaviour it is clear that Mr. Churchill (in a quiet mood) ond M. Molotov know that this historic day really belongs to Maisky and to Eden. Here is a film that will
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