THE CINEMA
" Once Upon a Honeymoon." At the Odeon.—" The Silver Fleet." At the Leicester Square.—" March of Time." At the Empire.--" White Cargo." At the Regal.
IT is with apprehension that one sets off again on the all-too-familiar film-journey to Nazi-occupied Europe. How well we now know the neat story of torture and heroism, posed and photographed with all the elegance of a fashion-plate for Vogue ; how resentfully one realises that the truth of what goes on behind the Nazi frontier must be as different front- these highly-coloured novelettes as death in a romantic eighteenth-century duel differs from slow and apathetic starvation in a disease-ridden slum. In Once Upon a Honeymoon, Ginger Rogers has never been better photographed, the high-lights shining from her golden hair frame her face in a halo, she affects an assortment of local American accents with the virtuosity of the variety-stage, she recites poetry and hears her quotations from Browning and Shakespeare capped by a jewel from Irving Berlin. Yet it is all by way of being good fun and for people like me who think that films of occupied Europe should not consist of undiluted comedy there is a scene in a Jewish concentration camp in which the prisoners wail most tunefully through the impressionistic shadows. This, however, is only an incident in a journey in which Miss Rogers, as a gold-digging American show-girk - watches her Nazi fifth-columnist of a husband undermine, in turn, Austria, Czecho- slovakia, Poland, Norway and France. She then collaborates with radio-commentator Caiy Grant in a successful piece of counter- espionage which brings her Bad Baron of a sponse to his timely end. The film covers a lot of ground and a lot of history, but the most memorable sequence shows Mr. Grant, disguised as a tailor, taking Miss Rogers' far from angular measuremer.ts with a flexible steel rule. At any rate, the film has the virtue of not taking itself too seriously. If we are to have a series of concentration camp comedies, they will rarely be as funny as this one. The Silver Fleet is more solemn and conventional, and tells the story of a Dutch shipbuilder (Ralph Richardson) whose neighbours think he is a quisling, but who really is the leader of a band of patriots. He succeeds in sending to England the first submarine built by his yard under Nazi rule, and then, at the cost of his own life, wrecks the second with most of his important Nazi " friends " on board. The film has an important advantage over the many similar melodramas that have preceded it ; a successful attempt has been made to put on the sere= the atmosphere of a small Dutch town and the quiet rhythm of Dutch family life. By using appro- priate English exterior scenes instead of studio sets, Erwin Hillier 'has been able to catch with his camera the soft, scarcely perceptible haze of a spring afternoon on a Dutch sea-front. A gate-post, a dormer-window, a squat sea-will, these simple things take on a warm intimacy which is not of the studio. On the day following the Nazi occupation the ship-builder strolls to the school to meet his son, and the two of them walk slowly home together with the other children racing and tumbling around them, ignoring the 'single German sentry, who is the only new thing in the sunny afternoon landscape. " Teacher said that lots of things are going to be different now," says the little boy. " Yes, I expect they will be," replies his father. Here surely is a true picture of what the quiet, un- dramatic beginning of occupation must have been for so many people for whom death was to be the end of it. Ralph 'Richardson gives
• a good Dutch portrait,- Esmond Knight contributes an astonishing performance as a Nazi and Willem Akkerman as the ship-builder's young son is a most attractive little actor.
From the more romantic aspects of war the current March of Time release carries us to the opposite extreme. The Navy and the Nation, 1943, is a beautifully photographed film of the patient scientific research and the often humdrum industrial organisation which lies behind the spectacular might of the U.S. Navy. No doubt the propaganda purpose of the film is to persuade the civilian artisan that, even though out of uniform, he is nevertheless fighting the war. The facts are indisputable, and yet the film scarcely succeeds in making the work of the shipyards or the commissariat a matter of much excitement. A number of commentators explain their particular war jobs, and everyone expresses himself as convinced that American industry is performing miracles, but even miracles cannot be successfully recounted 'with the imaginative approach of a mail- order catalogue. I very much enjoyed White Cargo. It belongs, of course, to the dear old days when our tropical colonies were places where whisky and native women competed for the soul of the decaying white man. Nowadays these territories bring us other anxieties, but White Cargo conjures up the past most successfully. Walter Pigeon in the process of saving his young assistant from Tondelayo (Hedy Lamarr) gives a horrifyingly realistic portrait of a man whose nerves have been frayed to breaking point by heat, confinement and the mannerisms
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