THE CINEMA
" The Sm all Back Room." (Empire.)—” Eureka Stockade." (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion).
REPIUMANDED the other day for blowing neither hot nor cold enough on the films I reviewed, and accused of lack of enthusiasm for the good and lack of invective for the bad, I am happy to have been given the opportunity by The Small Back Room to blow, with a perfectly clear conscience, very hotly indeed down a long golden trumpet, to the accompaniment of bells, cheers and other loud sounds indicative of praise. For it is a fine film. Taken from the novel by Mr. Nigel Balchin, it shows us how, during the war, a lame scientist with an inferiority complex finds his salvation in the suc- cessful dismantling of a booby-type bomb, and it also shows us with brilliant accuracy—and this is where the real strength of the film lies—the various men and women who, often temperamentally incompatible and coming from every walk of life, worked together in those days for the common good. Each one of these people can be recognised and pigeon-holed in the mind as instinctively as they would be in real life, and one accepts them so easily and fits them with so little effort into the remembered war-time pattern that one gets an uncanny sense of taking part in the picture oneself, or at any rate of re-living that part of one's history.
The cast is large and talented. Mr. David Farrar and Miss Kathleen Byron heads it, followed by Messrs. Leslie Banks, Jack Hawkins, Michael Gough, Cyril Cusack, Miss Renee Asherson and, in a small but memorable interpretation of a Cabinet Minister, Mr. Robert Morley. Not'one of these skilled actors appears to be acting, and although 'due credit must be given them they are aided immeasurably by the script writers,• directors and producers, the versatile Messrs. Powell and Pressburger. Only once do these two throw a shadow over their picture's effulgence, and that is when they plunge into symbolism and turn Mr. Farrar's yearning for the whisky he knows he must resist into an impressionist's nightmare. This is regrettable, but it is brief. For the rest there is humour, courage, pathos, suspense and a lively understanding of the English character.
* * * Following on the success of The Overlanders the Ealing Studios have made a second film in Australia with Mr. Chips Rafferty head- ing a large cast of competent and, to me, unknown actors. The Eureka Stockade, of which I am ashamed to say I had never heard, is a slice of history as dear to Australians as is the Magna Carta to us, and indeed it bears comparison inasmuch as both these episodes were concerned with the liberty and the rights of man. In 1853 gold is found in Australia, and every able-bodied man leaves his farm or job in the city and goes off with a spade to dig for it, thereby threatening the new-found colony with economic bank- ruptcy. Harried by the police who, forerunners of their present-day counterparts, demand to see their licences or any other bits of paper they happen to have on them at every possible opportunity, and thoroughly enraged at being chased, arrested and treated as intruders in a country they claim as their own, they riot. Troops are sent, and there, on Eureka Hill, five hundred ill-armed diggers are decimated in fifteen minutes. Public opinion is outraged, however, and feelings run so high that the authorities are forced in the end to give the miners their rights—land, laws, citizenship, all the things, in fact, that man desires so eagerly to possess and abuses so happily when he gets them.
This film has all the qualities of a first-rate documentary, with splendid crowd scenes, plenty of action and, for all Mr. Rafferty's excellence, no star to dim the myriad smaller lights. Romance in the shape of Miss Jane Barrett lifts its head warily from time to time, only to be submerged in a wave of clamouring manhood, in dirt and digging, drink and arson, bayonets and cavalry charges, only to be lost in a whole churning sea of men whipped into furious
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