The Cinema
" The Thirty-Nine Steps." At the New Gallery Tins unusually exciting and entertaining British production might have been called Variations on a Theme by John Buchan. The essential situation in Mr. Buchan's story is that Richard Hannay, on the track of foreign spies, is himself pursued both by the spies and by the police, who suspect him of murder. He has to act as a detective while he is being trailed as a criminal. This excellent idea survives intact in the film, but Hannay's adventures are mostly new, chiefly because the producers wanted women characters. Hence it is not the nervy American Scudder, who is murdered in Hannay's flat, but a beautiful female agent ; and Hannay is seriously embarrassed during his Scottish wanderings by the presence of a girl who betrays him—as she thinks—to the police. But the supposed police are spies who handcuff Hannay and the girl together, and in this state of enforced companionship they escape and struggle over the moors to a lonely inn, where they are taken for an eloping couple.
The comedy hereabouts is familiar but pleasantly done, and Miss Madeleine Carroll comes through well as the girl ; —better than in the more stately roles she has had usually in the past. It must be said, too, that her presence is not allowed to interfere with the adventures, which move rapidly and are thoroughly well contrived, at any rate until near the end. The climax of the film occurs during a performance at the Palladium, where—for a quite unconvincing reason— the master spy is watching the show from a box. I think that the closing episodes of Mr. Buchan's book—the im- personation of the First Sea Lord and the hunting down of the spies at their seaside lair are excellent screen material— would have brought the film to a much better and more dramatic conclusion.
However, The Thirty-Nine Steps is the best British film of its type yet made, and the best film Mr. Alfred Hitchcock has directed for some time. It is fully as exciting as The Man Who Knew Too Much, much more humanly credible, and not nearly so self-conscious. Mr. Robert Donat, though his touch is a trifle heavy at times, makes Hannay a much less wooden figure than most heroes of screen melodrama ; and—as usual in Mr. Hitchcock's pictures—there are some delightfully amusing character sketches in the minor parts.
.t‘ R.A.F." and " Shipyard " R.A.F. starts a run at the Polytechnic Theatre next Monday, June 17th, on which date Shipyard, now showing at the Polytechnic, moves to the Curzon. The difference between these two documentary pictures, both British productions, is that R.A.F. is a series of loosely connected episodes, often finely photographed, while Shipyard, a study of the recent building of the Orient Liner Orion' at Barrow-in-Furness, clothes its facts in a unifying atmosphere and gives them social significance. R.A.F., directed by John Betts, is an account of the work and play of the Royal Air Force at home and abroad. We see the training of recruits, the use of various types of aircraft, the duties of the R.A.F. in the Near East, and finally a brilliant display of aerobatics and aerial drill by a squadron of high-speed fighters. Two graphic sequences are concerned with parachuting and with manoeuvres round an aircraft carrier at sea ; but the film fails mostly to build its visual paragraphs into a visual story.
Shipyard, directed by Paul Botha, is notable for its success in relating the building of the Orion' to the daily life of Barrow-in-Furness, and fragments of conversation among the workmen are rendered with admirable effect to indicate the human side of an arduous industrial enterprise. Mr. Rotha's style is often rather too jerky for my taste, but he has got hold of the right way of handling this kind of subject ; and the final use of a news-reel extract showing the actual launching of the `Orion' by the Duke of Gloucester —he pressed a button in Australia and made a speech by radio telephone—suggests that there are great possibilities in this method of blending topical events with a documentary
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