" Action in the North Atlantic." At Warners and the
Regal.
THE CINEMA
" Dear Octopus." At the Gaumont and the Marble Arch Pavilion.
—" Dixie." At the Plaza.—" Coney Island." At the Odeon. IN Action in the North Atlantic we have a long straightforward story of the struggle of a merchant-ship's company against U-boats and raiding aircraft. The film was shot in the studio, and played by actors, and can claim to be the most spectacular account of the battle of supplies yet to reach the screen. We see an oil-tanker become a blazing inferno, itself foundering in a sea of fire, and we see the efforts of the trapped seamen to reach the dubious safety of the empty Atlantic which lies beyond the fiery ring ; yet, in spite of the immediate impact of these horrors, it is not such sequences which remain in the mind. It is when the heroes come home from the sea (and the film makes well the point that the work of merchant seamen is amongst the war's most heroic tasks) that the film acquires an extra dimension. It is when the captain returns to his anxious wife, the mate to his dockside café, and the seamen to their Union hiring-halls, that we begin to understand the strange dichotomy of the sailor's life, the swing between the perils of the sea and the domesticity of the shore. I suspect that even in a war film this sort of insight into a way of life makes more impression on the average cinemagoer than all the bangs and blood- letting that can be conjured up in the studio by the most ingenious effects-man. We like to find some relationship between our own lives and those of the characters of a film, and this relationship is more likely to be found in everyday events than in battlefield heroics. Bataan, reviewed last week, is a film which succeeds because the doomed American soldiers fight against a background which is a vision of home. Through their conversion is always Coming the dim nostalgic outlines of an unheroic world of dance. halls and drug-stores. Similarly in Action in the North Atlantic the film comes most sharply alive when Ruth Gordon welcomes home her exhausted survivor husband, and packs him off to bed as a prior necessity to any discussion of his gruesome adventures—a scene which will touch the -heart of any wife who has welcomed home a husband from the perils of the battlefield. We hear a great deal these days of the " film of escape." Dear Octopus, no doubt seeking to qualify in this category, is concerned only with the domestic scene. The film is lively and sensitive yet, by restricting its scope to the sentimentalities of a golden wedding and a family reunion, in its attempt to present little except sweetness and light, it undermines any belief that the domestic comedy is an answer to the general impatience with mediocre war films. Especi- ally in wartime, the " film of escape " dare not spread its wings and fly too far from day-to-day probabilities. Perhaps what war- weary audiences need is to be stimulated into contemplating some new or neglected facet of their own daily lives, finding in so doing a true recreation. Dear Octopus, failing to establish any link with general experience, becomes a fairy story about a remote and unim- portant world. Only when Celia Johnson (that most brilliant and woefully neglected screen actress) hints, with beautiful economy of technique, at the existence in her past of a less unruffled world, do we feel diat beyond the walls of the family mansion may lie the heartbreak and tears of a deeper experience. American studios are looking in quite a different direction for their own brand of escape film. Dixie and Coney Island employ all the colours of the rainbow and every well-worn trick of the back- stage story to beguile us into a belief that the turn of the century was a time of high-living and uninhibited songs. Dixie presents us with a subdued Bing Crosby, a Dorothy Lamour who is prepared to act, and a company of negro minstrels who present the famous song from which the film takes its name. For me the appeal of the minstrel show has always been non-existent, but the patriotic and nostalgic climax of song which this film achieves can scarcely fail to bring a tear to every native of the Southern States now visiting these shores. Coney Island is so spectacular that the eye is often baffled by the complicated evolutions of camera, stage and performers. We do not learn a great deal about the famous American pleasure-beach, but we are given a demonstration of how enough sex appeal from a single attractive actress (Betty Grable) can be as good as a feast.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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