At Warner's—" Thanks for Everything." At the New Gallery.
down, savoured with humour and satire. For almost the first time the huge ambitious Denham studios have produced films of the year. Even the thickest of the ham—the old among the portraits of military ancestors—goes smoothly something better than a mouse.
veterans discussing the Crimea in the Faversham home, ham-heroic tale, which describes how Lieutenant Harry Faver- sham, the Coward who resigned his commission at the start of the Sudanese War, disguised himself as a dumb Sangali and forced his brother officers to take back the white feathers they had sent him. What is new is the drive—and in the Sudanese sequences the conviction—of this new version. Far better than the American, it cannot fail to be one of the best time to everyone—four films have now been made of this THE story of The Four Feathers must be known by this On the screen a ham story doesn't matter : The Sisters, too,
is ham, and even more conventional—the girl who marries a hard-drinking journalist who loves her, but loves his freedom more. The pathos is very familiar—the husband returns drunk on the evening when his wife intends to tell him she is pregnant : they quarrel on Christmas Day beside the Christmas-tree. The San Francisco earthquake is thrown effectively in as make-weight, there is a tiny, timid sketch of a brothel which probably passed our universal aunts as a happy picture of family life, but the main situation is as old
as the cinema—you remember it in Cimarron—the husband
who rides away and goes on loving all the time. But, as I
say, ham doesn't matter : The Sisters is worth seeing for the
sake of the adroit period direction and the fragile, pop-eyed acting of Miss Bette Davis.
core. At the same time, there is a certain lack of coherence in So in The Four Feathers the plot hardly matters : what is its style owing to this overlay of an alien method of composition important is the colour, which is almost invariably pleasant
every cry the vultures rise squawking from their meal and settle again. The picture is finely acted by Mr. John Clements and Mr. Ralph Richardson, and Miss June Duprez not only looks lovely, but also holds her own with these first- class actors.
Previous page
