THE CINEMA
"It Always Rains on Sunday." (Odeon)—" Saigon." (Plaza.) ALTHOUGH it is true that it does nearly always rain on a Sunday, it is equally true that Mondays are often quite fine, and it is odd nobody has noticed that poverty, vice and squalor flourish in dry weather as well as in wet. One of these days an up-and-coming producer will plant his criminal types, his escaped convicts, his spivs and bookies and burglars in a brilliantly sunlit setting, but at the moment it is, apparently, too revolutionary to expect criminals to work on fine days, and in the film at the Odeon everybody is, as usual, soaking wet from first to last. This picture, fully focused on the East End, is, except meteorologically, fair to moderate. It has some admirable moments, the background is meticulously correct and the characters entirely credible, yet, because there are so many people demanding attention and so many subsidiary interests, there is little time for the main story to take root in the imaginar;on. The seeds of curiosity languish for want of sustenance. Although for this reason It Always Rains on Sunday is not, for all its melodrama, a good narrative film, it can be very highly commended as a documentary. Miss Googie Withers is one of our few acting film actresses, and the lively flame she carries is ably fed by sparks struck by Miss Hermione Baddeley, Miss Betty Ann Davis and Mr. Jack Warner off the tinder-box of East London.
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One person, Mr. Luther Adler, saves Saigon from being a most
profoundly tedious film. A long time ago he appeared here on the
stage in The Golden Boy, and the years have in no way tarnished
the gold, but whether it is worth braving a long insignificant
platitudinous picture to catch a few brief glimpses of him is a moot point. Mr. Alan Ladd and Miss Veronica Lake struggle courageously to energise situations so old as to be moribund, but they lag far behind the audience which knows their every thought, word and action for the next decade and could lead them !Android to their common destiny even though the battered path they tread
curves this time through Indochina. VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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