THE CINEMA
" We Dive at Dawn " and " The Glory of Sebastopol." At the Leicester Square.—" Lenin in 1918." At the Tatter.-.—" Cabin in the Sky ' and " Food and War." At the Empire.
SINCE so many of our problems of war-time propaganda and enter- tainment can be tackled if you recognise that the soldier is also a citizen, it is galling to find that the relationship between the soldier and his home-life is one which normally leaves film-makers com- pletely baffled. In Which We Serve owed its success mainly to the wedding of mess-decks and parlour, but We Dive at Dawn—aiming at something less ambitious but in the same kind—arouses our deep feelings only when its heroes are at sea. In this film Jack ashore is a very unconvincing creature indeed and his womenfolk wear their hearts on their sleeves in a way which would deeply shock the good folk of Portsmouth or Chatham. The fault is partly in the casting (Eric Portman has a part almost comically unsuitable), but the scenario is largely to blame in assuming that what happens back in the mean streets of the pdit, or in the submarine commander's elegant flat, is any less important than the details of breaking through a Baltic defence net. The scenes of the submarine in action have been written, directed and acted with care and feeling, and We Dive at Dawn is well worth seeing, if only for the sequence in which the submarine, after breaking through into the Baltic, attacks a German battleship and is then depth-charged by escorting destroyers. No more convincing picture of the behaviour of men under fire has ever come from the studios, and Anthony Asquith, who directed, and John Mills, who plays- the part of the submarine commander, are both to be congratulated. John Mills (remarkable also, it will be remembered, in a sharply contrasting part in In Which We Serve) is emerging as an actor with a special flair for realistic portrayals. In this film there is a sequence in which he is waiting at the peri- scope for his target to come within range. He might have been cool, confident, phlegmatic ; instead, he is jumpy and anxious, nervously uncertain for a moment about the range, then a bit querulous with his crew. He behaves, in fact, like a man faced with his first great professional opportunity and driving hi3 mind like a racehorse to guard against everything that may go wrong. As a back- ground to this play of emotion, the intricate mechanics of sub- marine operation are faithfully recorded—all sight and sound dominated by the sharp, impatient finger-snap of the commander
calling for his periscope to be swung up and give him another, nearer sight of his prey. This is film-making at its very best.
Lenin in 1918 is a long and somewhat static seqW to Lenin in October. It deals with Lenin's fight against reformist, " intellec- tuals " and anarchists, as well as against the Whites, re- eracts his attempted assa,,sination by Fanny Kaplan, and shows his recovery assured by the stimulating news that Stalin has won a victory at Tsaritsyn (Stalingrad) by countermanding the orders of Trotsky. The film was made when the Moscow trial of " Trotsky- ist elements " was an important Soviet issue and its • historical accuracy appears to have suffered somewhat in consequence. Shchukin, as Lenin, once more gives an uncannily brilliant perform- ance. In his scene with Gorky he contrives to radiate a warm, electric personality which it is hard to realise is not-from Lenin him- self. Stalin is less comfortably portrayed, and looks and behaves much more like an inhabitant of Madame Tussaud's than a tough Georgian with a sense of humour and an appetite for four and a half hour dinners. The film tends to ignore the broad achievements of the Bolsheviks at this stage of the Revolution in favour of polemics, with the result that we stay in offices and hear of the per- fidies of Bukharin, Zinoviev and Kamenev when we would prefer to go out and see what was happening in the country. The Glory of Sebastopol makes it clear that whoever laid the foundations of the Red Army, whether it was Trotsky or Stalin, did a world-shaking job. This film of the defence of Sebastopol, which emphasises also the n3le of the Red Navy, suffers from following the films of Lenin- grad and Stalingrad, which left little more to be said of Russian heroism in defehce of her cities. A series of such films of death and destruction are perhaps necessary as a regular reminder of how much heavier a sacrifice Russia has been called upon to make in face of the common enemy than have Britain and America. A Cabin in the Sky is a simple little fantasy of negro life set to music and played by an all-negro cast. While the forces of Lucifer and the forces of the Lord (each appropriately uniformed) wrestle for the soul of Eddie " Rochester " Anderson with the aid of every ingenuity of modern civilisation, the proceedings are enlivened by the music of Ethel Waters and Duke Ellington. Miss Waters' act- ing is more stereotyped than her singing, and Louis Armstrong, who appears unexpectedly amongst Lucifer's " ideas men," is allowed only to blow a few bars on his trumpet, but in spite of these restrictions the film achieves moments of exuberance and spontaneity which appear to be as much enjoyed by players as by audience. In the same programme is a March of Time analysis of the problems of U.S. agriculture in relation to lease-lend supplies to Britain and Russia and to the problems of feeding post=war Europe. The scenes are for the most part unremarkable and the treatment pedestrian, but the film is to be welcomed for its advocacy of post-war collaboration between nations in solving the problenr of feeding the world. EDGAR ANSTEY. .
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