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immensely powerful if provocative portrait of Henry. Accurately, I think, he shows the Tudor King to be a man of profound egotism, with personal motives always underlying his public actions, yet with sufficient cunning to stop short of tyranny. It is more the emphasis of the script than of his performance that makes prominent Henry's selfishness, cruelty, ingratitude, and sensuality; and the grossness of the King's manners, though startling to our generation, is doubtless true to the period. Laughton's performance, easily the finest of his brief screen career, dominates the work of an able cast of whom we would like to have seen more : in particular of Merle Oberon as Anne Boleyn, Elsa Lanchester as the Ugly Duchess from Germany, and Robert Donat as Culpeper.
In technique the film is the most polished and workmanlike yet produced in this country. The expert hand of the artist and craftsman is evident everywhere, from the beautiful photography of Perinal to the smallest detail in the costumes designed by John Armstrong. Korda's direction is a remarkable feat of controlled construction. From so many diverse elements he has created a film which, if inevitably episodic in development, has a distinctive and compelling unity. The Private Life of Henry VIII gives Korda an assured place among the important directors in contemporary cinema.
F. H.
WAS A SPY
Production: GaumontBritish. Direction: Victor Saville. Scenario: W. P. Lipscomb. Photography: Charles van Enger. Art Direction: Alfred Junge. Editing: Fred Smith. With Conrad Veidt, Madeleine Carroll, Herbert Marshall, Gerald du Marnier, Edmund Gwenn, Donald Calthrop.
When a picture evokes almost unanimous praise from the popular writers, I always feel that we should approach the gilded shrine on bended knees. True, Gaumont 's new opus has not been likened unto a " mountain peak dominating the surrounding landscape,'3 yet I think it might well be described as a bump impeding the traffic of the Strand. We have been asked so many times by our Sunday papers to give the Gaumont boys a big hand that it must have become a habit with we poor writers, but I must confess that Saville's new picture brought me up with a jerk in my seat. Let me describe it.
The story is taken from the adventures of Mile. Marthe Cnockaert, a Belgian, who nursed German wounded in the small market town of Roulers during 191 5, for which duties she was awarded the Iron
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