THE CINEMA
" Let the People Sing." At the Leicester Square.—" One of Our
Aircraft is Missing." At the Odeon. " Ladies in Retire- ment." At the Regal.
IN these days when all virtue and all deficiency in a picture are customarily laid at the door of the director, it is easy to forget that . in the studio story-film his first and sometimes his only responsi- bility is to guide the players in the interpretation of their parts. How considerable a creative opportunity may remain within such apparent limitations is demonstrated by the work of Mr. John Baxter. Not that Mr. Baxter fails to extend his influence to every department of film-making, from scripting to editing. But the peculiar, heterodox, almost perverse technique of his films derives primarily from an uncanny power over his actors, a spell successfully , cast not only upon the young unsophisticated player but upon old troupers who should by now be case-hardened to every wile of the producer. In Love On the Dole, Baxter extracted from a group of new young actors and a revivified bunch of old stagers an inter- pretation of Walter Greenwood's play which differed from the original as realism differs from symbolism. The players found within themselves power to breathe into the story a vitality denied to any British piece of screen fiction before or since. In The Common Touch Baxter took a naive, gawky modern legend and made his actors believe in it. Now we have Let the People Sing, an insubstantial little piece of Priestley parochialism from which Fred Emney, Alastair Sim, Edward Rigby, Maire O'Neill and a host of other pillars of the British stage build up a picture of democracy which comes pleasantly close to the nebulous thing for which we are fighting. The story is of an exiled Czech professor and a super- annuated stage comic who become involved in the frustration of an attempt by " United Plastics Ltd." and the local town council to deprive the people of Dunbury of their Hall and turn it either into a commercial showroom or a museum. The fate of the Hall has finally to be decided by arbitration, and the climax of the film provides an opportunity for the case for cupidity and commerce and the case for snobbish tradition to be demolished by the alcoholically inspired humanitarianism of Fred Emney. It is a very long time since we saw so funny a sequence as this. The Czech professor is there to speak some Priestley philosophy, to talk somewhat vaguely about British traditions and the perils of mass-production and the machine, but it is the gusto of John Baxter's old actors which brings warmth, sanity and a rare sense of decency to the theme. And from the younger members of the cast Patricia Roc takes a prominent place amongst Baxter's growing gallery of new or transmuted stars. The philosophical sentiments of Let the People Sing are consider- ably less enchanting than its hearty displays of initiative and dis- respect for leaden-footed authority. What a pleasant and what a healthy relief it is from much of our current propaganda to be reminded that this country, being alive, is capable of disunity. It is like a return from barbarism to see a force of police being swept firmly to one side by a stream of indignant burghers.
One of Our Aircraft is Missing is, by contrast, a curiously restrained and diffident piece of work. The story of a British air- crew brought down in Holland and sent back to England by Dutch patriots clearly bristles with dramatic opportunities, but most of them appear to me to have been missed. We are left with a moving sequence of a Dutch village royally entertaining the crew with its precious food supplies, two excellent performances by Pamela Brown and Googie Withers and a brilliantly re-enacted night raid on Stuttgart. For the rest the film is embarrassingly shapeless and self-conscious. A paragraph remains to add to the week's tally of good British acting an overdue tribute to Ida Lupino's performance in Ladies in Retirement. This patchy film provides confirmation, if it were needed, that this young actress is destined to become one of the
screen's great players of tragedy. EDGAR ANSTEY.
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