WHITEWASH?
SIR,—While in Italy last week, I had a cutting of Miss Quigly's review of Under Ten Flags. I have since read Ludovic Kennedy's very sound letter on the same subject. When she says 'script by an odd trio,' including my own name, may I point out that, since the film was made in Italy, it is not very odd that there should be an Italian director—that, since the subject was German, it is still less odd that there should have been a German script-writer—and that, since there was an English Admiral in the film, it is not eccentric to have asked an English writer like myself to deal with his part?
As for her strictures on the German Q-ship com- mander, Ludovic Kennedy has already exposed her ignorance; but it seems to me that the attitude of mind is even more disturbing. If a critic is to lump together every individual who fights under a dic- tator as a war-criminal it shows a total lack of political knowledge or even human understanding. The tragic story of such events as the life and death of Rommel or the July Plot and von Hassell's murder, must be a closed and unintelligible book to such a mind—a type of mind, incidentally, which makes the task of such martyrs as the last-named still more difficult.
Finally, from the purely progressive angle, it is sad to think that, when film companies arc at last making international films as a contribution to national understanding, their efforts (unless they have already been censored by Colonel Blimp) arc likely to receive an insensitive reaction from sour critic.—Yours faithfully,
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