The Cinema
" O'er Hill and Dale." At the Tatler NOT long before the closing of the Empire Marketing Board, its Film Unit, under John Grierson, made for the Gaumont Company several short documentary films about British industries. These films have found their way very quietly into the cinemas, heralded by none of that generous publicity which Gaumont bestows on its own dramatic productions. There is an opportunity of seeing one of them this week at the little Tatler Theatre in Charing Cross Road, where it will stay until the programme changes on Easter Monday.
O'er Hill and Dale, produced by John Grierson and directed by Basil Wright, is a study of lambing time in the Cheviot Hills. One difficulty in treating this sort of subject is to steer a line between trite sentimentality and pedestrian dullness. What is necessary is to let the facts speak for themselves, which is not so easy as it may sound, for the facts have to be first selected and then expressed in terms of pictorial imagery. Mr. Wright shows us the daily round of a Cheviot shepherd—but let no one expect a picturesque veteran in tam-o-shanter and plaid shawl. This shepherd is a gaunt figure in jacket and trousers who might be any elderly artisan—but he knows his job. He doses the new- born lambs with aniseed mixture to ward off dysentery, rescues a wanderer from a chilly burn, and ingeniously persuades a bereaved ewe to accept a strange lamb taken from a pair of twins whose mother will soon forget that the ewe had more than one. This is managed by flaying the fleece from the bereaved ewe's dead lamb and wrapping it round the foster-child, which then acquires the family smell demanded by its new mother. Finally, a wintry storm blows up ; the shepherd takes home a half-frozen lamb, and his wife soon restores it to vigour by putting it for a short time in the domestic oven.
All these practical aspects of the shepherd's task are shown us in a quarter of an hour, against an attractive background, never over-emphasized, of bare hills and running streams and cloud shadows sweeping over the slopes.
Previous page
