Roundabout

Dissenter

IN PARIS the popular newspapers

• with photographs of short-skirted, were still filling their front pages low-necklined vedettes—all white- As always in a crisis, the holiday sun seemed to grow bigger and hotter with each threatening headline, and when the film addicts stopped on the Croisette to say, 'Have you seen . . . 7', they Were talking of newspapers, not motion pictures. However, nothing stopped the continued arrival of the stars who plumped down in the foyers as though dropped by parachute.

Orson Welles made a stately, booming appear- ance and answered with mild irony the silly, repetitive questions of the middle-aged shrews from the world's gossip columns. When the win- ners were announced (palme d'or for When The Crones Are Flying, from Russia, and Special Jury Prize for. Tati's Mon Oncle) with a kiss from nubile Martine Carol, justice was not only done but seen to be done. Not a boo was heard.

The Cannes Festival had begun largo with a leisurely parade of stars about whom the photo- graphers clustered like flies. There was plenty of time for the beach where the English tourists strolled in Guards mufti and only an occasional starlet eased down the top of her bikini for the press. The most exotic sight was the striking chateinine of a local café who drove a spanking donkey-cart in a peacock-striped sunsuit while two tame parrots perched on her head.

The Festival became prestissimo with the spectacular and unexpected gala given by the Russians. In the ballroom of the sedate Hotel Ambassadeurs, they built a miniature circus ring Where the Moscow troupe juggled and tumbled and tight-roped and trapezed With brave, ever- fixed smiles. A storm of bravos greeted' the stun- ning Soviet star Miss Tatiana Samoilova, a solemn intellectual version of Audrey Hepburn, who flung her arms wide suddenly in an old-fashioned gesture of delight.

The most controversial film in a tame fortnight was Ingmar Bergman's brilliant but gruelling Close To Life (Director's Prize) which eaves- dropped on three expectant mothers in the labour Ward. Nothing was spared—even the five-minute scream and the fit of vomiting. Where is the beauty of childbirth? asked the (male) critics. A better question is : who will have the courage to bring this to London? •, According to the Cannes tradition, the audience clapped any purple patches in the films. Animals and scenery were especially. .applauded and the appearance of an army of CinemaScope sheep in L'Eau Vive for some reason provoked near- hysteria. Only one throaty voice dared holla, 'C'est ridicule!'

Preventer

DUBLIN WAS LOOKING her best for her Tostal, the Festival of Ireland. Laburnum and lilac were exploding in every park and in every other picture-postcard suburban garden. But was the Tostal looking its best for Ireland? There was sport with the £5,000 Hospitals Golf Tournament —everyone knows that this grand game was in- vented by the Irish giant Finn McCool. There was a Gaelic Storytelling Contest—the continuation of an all-year-round pastime. There was music— with the foreign BBC Symphony Orchestra broad- casting from Limerick. But' the heart of this Tostal—the Theatre Festival—had stopped beat- ing.

The organisers had chosen their programme ingenuously. There was a play by O'Casey (in exile : works banned). There were plays by Samuel Beckett (in exile : works banned). There was a dreary and inoffensive adaptation of Ulysses—never banned but still considered too indecent for the Censors to read. When the list was sent to 'your man above in Drumcondra,' the Archbishop froze and refused his blessing. And there was no Theatre Festival in Ireland.

Dublin had few foreign visitors for its muffled carnival. A man in a bar claimed to have seen a busload of Italian girls. Nobody believed him. And as long as the pubs stayed open to midnight for the occasion, nobody cared. In the early hours, festive Dubliners argued their way home through streets where grimy, bulbless fairy-lights drooped between crypto-Georgian concrete lamp-posts.

Life goes on without a Tostal. The Dublin hospitals are stripped of staff by the annual migra- tion of specialists which coincides with the mayfly; up first on Sheelin and then on Corrib. Dr. Noel Browne forms a new Leftish ,political party with the ardent support of one other member. Skibber- een Urban Council is in session. Mr. C. Connolly reports that the local epidemic of colds is being attributed to atomic radiation. Mrs. B. Sheehy complains that a mysterious kind of 'flu is spread- ing. Mr. W. O'Brien asserts that everybody has a continual sniffle. And a unanimous resolution is adopted calling on the Minister for External Affairs to make sure that the jet planes passing overhead are not carrying atom bombs, and, if . they are, kindly to put a stop to them. Ireland is at its best for the Tostal.

Inventor

DR. BARNES NEVILLE WALLIS was worried, as pink and white and worried as the White Rabbit in Alice. The seventy-year-old eccentric genius of British aviation was not really put out because the Minister of Defence had ended government support for Wallis's revolutionary new folding- wing Swallow which could reach Moscow in an hour. He was used to dunderheaded opposition —though he did murmur wistfully, 'It would be nice to have one Minister of the Crown who knew a lift-coefficient from a coal shovel.'

After he had designed the airship R100 during the First World War, the Government withdrew its backing because Churchill said the war would be over in three months. After it was built, the authorities got cold. feet because the R101 crumpled in flames and his brain-child was crushed to scrap by steam-rollers. And he found the same opposition to his bouncing bomb which eventually breached the Moline Dam, and to his spinning bomb which eventually sank the Tirpitz. 'They always want a solution which is easy and obvious. But it doesn't exist. You have to start from the bottom rung of the ladder every time,' he said, drinking China tea, and chuckling sadly, in his office with the green fairground dome by the side of the old Brooklands Race Track.

What was saddening the old intellectual prize- fighter was that the names of the aircrew boys from 617 Squadron were fading from his air photograph of the Moline Dam. They had scrawled them there the day they were decorated by the King. Now several were almost illegible and the rest became more ghostly every day.

'You can still see Guy Gibson's name,' he said. 'As you would expect, Guy put it bang in the middle of the flood water. But what am Ito do about the others? I've consulted the Keeper of Ancient Manuscripts at the British Museum. I've badgered the photographic experts at Kodak. I've experimented with infra-red light. I've even con- sidered hiring a forger to go over them again with indelible ink. But this is one problem I can't solve. If you have any ideas I'd be very grateful for them.'