THE' CINEMA
" Thunderhead, Son of Flicka." At the Gatimont.—" Experiment Perilous." At the Tivoli.—" To Have and Have Not " and " Penicillin." At Warners. — " Stricken Peninsula." For General Release.
Thsinderhead, Son of Flicka brings back to the screen a whiff of those wide open spaces which were once the special province of the cinema. Here are no -cattle rustlers and whooping redskins, but a more modern though no less improbable tale of the horse ranches of Wyoming and Utah. A wild stallion from the hills preys upon a rancher's herd and little Roddy McDowall sees his colt Thunder- head finally challenge and defeat the marauder. The herds moving through the pale green plains and the echoing canyons of the horse country provide subject-matter enough, but the superimposed plot is as pardonable as a fairy tale. Experiment Perilous comes near to being a very good film indeed. Unfortunately a serious attempt at the characterisation of a jealous and unbalanced husband is spoiled' by a ridiculously melodramatic climax.- Paul Lukas, Hedy Latnarr and George Brent skilfully create a dramatic triangle which only in the last sequence turns back into the Hollywood trade-mark. In the opening of To Have and Have Not there is some similarity between the film and Hemingway's
novel, but thereafter we become involved in a conventional anti- Vichy .episode set:in Madagascar, and designed primarily as a back- ground for the debut of Miss Lauren Bacall, a new star of the synthetic variety. Miss Bacall will undoubtedly have a success, but who dare predict its duration? To Have and Have Not fails to achieve the polish, the power or the subtly contrived nostalgias of Casablanca, on which it is largely based, but on the credit side is Hoagy Carmichael's clever music and a few minutes of genuine Bogart toughery. and the Therapeutic Research Corporation have jointly sponsored Penicillin, which tells clearly and factually the story of
the discovery and commercial production of the drug. All of the
many British chemists and doctors involved are given their share of the credit, although they are so numerous that the glimpses of their work have to be tantalisingly brief. Interleaved with the science is the personal story of a soldier whose leg is saved by the drug's use. Stricken Peninsula, the M.o.I. monthly release, is a docu- menttry of life in Southern Italy in the months prior to the ex pulsion of the Nazis from the north. Paul Fletcher's account of a people suffering the pains of liberation has been made eloquent by a brilliant choice of episode and visual symbol. The starving and diseased people crowd anxiously from one scene of squalor and desolation to another until at last the film gathers hope from the peasants out with their ploughs again in the war-scarred fields.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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