CINEMA I HAVE not read Joan Henry's book on life
in a women's prison, but I am told it is excellent, and 1 cannot help feeling that although Miss Henry has collaborated in its translation from paper to screen she must be somewhat startled at the result. For so many of the characters, though doubtless based on fact, have acquired a fictitious mode of behaviour more suited either to a Ben Travers farce or to an Angela Brazil school story. As in most prison films, the caged malefactors are infinitely more weak than wicked. Glynis Johns is in gaol because she was foolish about a gambling debt, Diana Dors because she covered up for a friend, Jane Hylton, because she went out dancing and her baby smothered itself with a pillow. The only genuine criminals about the place are a fearfully jolly family of shop- lifters and Athene Seyler; who once suggested to Sybil Thorndike that she should put a spoonful of weed killer in A. E. Matthews's tea, an unnecessary measure, as it turned out, for the old gentleman died before it could be administered. These two superb actresses are shown at some length plotting their abortive murder, and they are exquisitely funny but about as probable as the characters in Arsenic and Old Lace. Humorists, we know, exist everywhere, even in criminal circles, but here all the comedy, delightful as it is, belongs to stage, not film comedy. There are a number of flashbacks showing how the weak strayed into the hands of the police, and though sympathy for their sins is not ardently invited one is prejudiced in their favour by the fact that all of them, save one loud-mouthed drab, are pleasant, nice-looking, unembittered and extremely kind to each other, that all the wardresses are hectoring schoolmarms, and that one is shown babies being removed from their mothers, lovers being parted and other minor harshnesses. In sum, for all its authentic setting, I do not believe in this prison nor in the 'prison without bars' to which Miss Johns and Miss Dors are ulti- mately transferred, for I am old-fashioned enough to hope that the evil as well as the silly are occasionally brought to justice.
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