THE CINEMA
" Hangmen Also Die." At the Tivoli.—" The Silent Village." At the Regal and the Empire.—" When We Are Married " and " Brains Trust No. 3." At the New Gallery.
Hangmen Also Die and The Silent Village both are concerned with the execution of Heydrich by Czech patriots and the Nazi reign of terror which followed. The first film is from Hollywood, and is produced and directed by Fritz Lang (Metropolis, The Spy, " M," Fury). The second is from our own Crown Film Unit, and is pro- duced and directed by Humphrey Jennings (Fires Were Started). We have had evidence during the past two years in such films as Western Union and Man Hunt that Fritz Lang has become more conventional in the style of his direction, but to describe Hangmen Also Die as conventional would be to use an unwarrantably kind adjective. One is reluctant to attach the whole blame to Mr. Lang. It appears that some Hollywood historian must have remembered The Spy, remembered that Alexander Granach was available to represent the Gestapo and suggested that Fritz Lang should revive his earry German manner and give us a rope's-end view of Nazi- occupied Europe. Mr. Lang has striven loyally to oblige, but he has discovered that the sufferings of the Czech people cannot adequately be described within the romantic limits of detective fiction. He has discovered, too, that in Hollywood the old subtly sinister touches are less respected than are the emotions traditionally asso- ciated with Maria Marten and the Red Barn. The result is a long- winded piece of plotting and counter-plotting full of excruciatingly bad dialogue in the American idiom, and in which the characterisa- tion and acting is never far from burlesque. Propaganda considera-
tions are thrown to the wind in the interests of complexity of plot, with the result that the myth of the infinite cunning of the Nazi superman is left only slightly discomfited. In one sequence the cruelties of the Gestapo (a quisling is tortured by accident) are calculated to win the approval of the audience. After Milestone's
Edge of Darkness had shown signs that thought was being given to the serious problem of presenting Nazi-occupied Europe on the screen, Hangmen Also Die is indeed a disappointment.
Humphrey Jennings has done a very much better job in The Silent Village in so far as his people are human beings. Unfortunately,
however, they are handicapped by the curious hypothesis on which the film is based. It purports to show what might have happened if the massacre of Lidice which followed the assassination of Heydrich had occurred in a Welsh mining village instead of in Czechoslovakia.
Given this theme, Jennings has used a real mining community to express the sullen heroism of a simple people faced by the alternating torture of the loud-speaker and the bullet. Individual scenes are directed with a care for detail based on painstaking observation, yet the total effect is unconvincing because the initial assumption is a matter of " Let's pretend." The miners, their wives and children act with great sincerity, but the naturalness of their behaviour blends oddly with the allegorical nature of the situation. It is difficult to see what useful propaganda the Ministry of Information believed would emerge from asking for the performance of such a solemn charade in the guise of a documentary film.
From these extravagances of the week one turns with something like relief to the film version of Priestley's When We Are Married. Static, slow and wordy as it often is, we have here a good light plot, some excellent dialogue, well spoken, and a handful of recog- nisable citizens displaying far from heroic characteristics. Brains Trust No. 3, in the same programme, continues to discuss a variety of topics, important and frivolous, with somewhat less sparkle and speed than one remembers from earlier issues of the series.
No new film has yet come along to challenge in importance the Ministry of Information's World of Plenty, briefly mentioned on this page last week and now showing at the Rialto. It has been announced that this film was flown to the United States in time to be shown to the Hot Springs Food Conference. It is to be hoped that the Ministry of Information will in future look forward in productions of this nature rather than backward in films like The Silent Village. The technique of the World of Plenty is admirably suited to stimulating thought on the nature of the post- war world we are even now building. During the course of the film's discussion of planned food distribution, wary British and American farmers, scientists like Sir John Orr and Lord Horder, and politicians like Lord Woolton piece together the conception of an international food plan as being something more than a war-time expedient. It emerges as a necessary condition of continued peace after the war is over. As a warning of the alternative, we see illustrated the pre-war horrors of poverty in the midst of plenty. Extracts from speeches by President Roosevelt, Mr. Wellington Koo, Henry Wallace and others dovetail neatly into the contributions of ordinary men and women caught in the streets of British and American cities. The thread of the economic argument runs to and fro across the Atlantic, weaving together newsreel material, docu- mentary sequences, statistical diagrams and multiple-image scenes against an imaginative sound background. The technique adds the informal liveliness of the " Living Newspaper " of the pre-war U.S. Federal Theatre to that respect for pure fact which has been a mark of most previous sociological documentaries 'made in this country. The conclusion reached is that in the Century of the Common Man— the only logical outcome of the Atlantic Charter—the international control of world products must everywhere be used to guarantee freedom from want. In a film so ambitious there are bound to be faults. There is a tendency to treat the Lease-Lend policy as a piece of pure altruism, and the end sequences of the film sometimes savour of pious rather than practical aspiration. Yet this war has demon- strated that the will to achieve will carry us more than half-way to achievement. itself. It is the function of this film to inspire deter- mination, and it represents a major contribution to the United Nations' will to plan.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
The fact that goods made of raw materials in short supply owing to war conditions are advertised in this journal should not be taken as an indication that they are necessarily available for export.
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