THE CINEMA
This Land is Mine could have been a great film. Here is a piece of anti-Nazi propaganda courageous enough to quote a reasoned case for Nazism and for collaboration with the Nazis, realistic enough to suggest to its audience- that a Nazi occupation of Britain or the United States would not turn all Anglo-Saxons into heroes, and shrewd enough to present the middle-class political, dilemma as providing the soil on which Fascism thrives everywhere. Yet the film fails to engage our emotions on anything but a superficial level. The story purports to be of ordinary people. A timid schoolmaster in an unspecified country under Nazi control becomes innocently involved in sabotage. To save his life his mother betrays the real
saboteur and as a result the schoolmaster is shamed into violent political activity. He gains wisdom and courage and before the Gestapo leads him finally away finds opportunity .publiely to pro- claim his faith in democracy. The strength of the narrative as it was written down in the scenario lay in the fact that it presented problems and people to be found anywhere from Norway to Greece : as it appears on the screen it is relevant only to characters to be found in Hollywood. Walter Slezak as the Nazi commander is excellent ; George Sanders, as an anti-socialist changing almost imperceptibly into a puzzled quisling, is adequate ; but the two principal characters, the schoolmaster and his mother, are so over- acted by Charles Laughton and Una O'Connor that all universality disappears from the situation. What a pernicious thing the " star- system " is when it demands that story be sacrificed to histrionics. Hete was a situation which if underplayed and presented with a decent and dignified reticence could have contributed significantly to our appreciation of the trials and triumphs of Europe.
Close Quarters is a Crown Film Unit documentary of the sub- marine service which falls between two, stools. Its story is spread to thin for a dramatic feature film, and it is too superficial in style for an informational documentary. Since the success of Target for Tonight, the Crown Unit has stuck doggedly to the same story formula. A small group of men with their homespun wisecracks go off on an operation, face and survive the hazards of flak, fire or depth-charge. Their faces, words and actions all are impeccably authentic, but—particularly in Close Quarters—something is lacking. Perhaps it is that we expect the official Government unit to present us with something more than a good anecdote. With the whole stupendous panorama of modern war to be painted we cannot always be satisfied with a series of miniatures, however skilfully done. The commercial studios might well be left to dramatise exciting war-time episodes (John Mills's submarine attack in We Dive at Dawn is more convincing than the similar episode played by a real submarine crew in Close Quarters), but the broad strategies and the profounder issues of the war are unlikely to be filmed except by Government subsidy. It is surely here rather than in the field of melodrama that Government film-making will find most useful scope.
They Got Me Covered deals with the spy-hunting adventures of Bob Hope, and contains two or three episodes in the very highest tradition of screen comedy. Mr. Hope might well have been content to trust in his face for his fortune, supplementing his physical endowments with a flair for delivering anti-climatic lines of dialogue. Instead he has always sought comedy situations which would be obviously and immediately funny to the camera, and it is this addition which has raised him to the rank of leading screen comedian.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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