Mr. Terence Rattigan, who this week won, for the second
tima in three years, the Ellen Terry award for the best play of the year, was speculating the other day about how film-producers would manage if custom decreed, as it does in the theatre, that every per- formance should be interrupted by (on the average) two intervals during which the audience are left to their own devices. Apart from having to contend with the marginal brouhaha caused by people returning to their scats after the curtain has risen and the musical va a vient of tea-trays, the dramatist has the not inconsiderable, task of recapturing the mood of the audience, whose minds have strayed even if their feet have not—a task which, if measured in the units normally involved, works out at a prodigious total of butler- miles every year. A film, once it has cast a spell, is never required to break it. If it were, I suppose, the producer would have to over-; come the same sort of handicap as the dramatist: though I scent to remember that in bygone days we thought nothing of waiting a week between one instalment of a gripping serial and the next, and that the simple caption "Elaine, trapped by Mendoza, is locked in the boat-house with a man-eating ape" sufficed to subdue our fanciel utterly and instantaneously to the matter in hand.
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