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revolution in Baku, the British intervention, the arrest and murder of the twenty-six leaders of the Baku Soviet. This, unfortunately, is a silent film, for the first two reels, at least, lend themselves to dialogue treatment. These two reels are interior shots of a meeting where the conflicting tendencies of the people towards the intervention find expression. The sequence is shot with considerable imagination, but titles are insufficient. Later, when action replaces talk, the absence of dialogue is welcome. The drama moves along swiftly, unhampered by that microphone consciousness which still seems to paralyse some Soviet directors.
Two other sequences are notable — a civil riot building up from the smallest of incidents, and the final massacre of the commissars in the desert — a sequence which is handled with a real feeling for the drama of the event. The utter callousness of the massacre is equalled by the quiet stoicism of the revolutionaries.
Twenty-six Commissars was directed by Shengelaya. His selection of types is superb. So also is the camera work. The censor will never allow this film to be publicly exhibited in Britain, although it is true. Film societies ought to show it. Ralph Bond.
SPRING ON THE FARM.— This background educational film, produced by the E.M.B. Film Unit and directed by Evelyn Spice, is a good journalistic account of Spring. Cut and designed for children, it is naturally slow in tempo, though the numbers of young animals will stir the fundamental sentimentalisms of English and Scots in any cinema. Photography is notably competent, and shows that there is as much value in a white sky as in blue sky with cumulus clouds.
D. F. T.
Mickey's Gala Premiere. — In a Miscellany note in the summer number I suggested that the drawn film was capable of much wider development and that it might easily be used as a medium for caricature. As if in illustration of the suggestion, Walt Disney has made this burlesque of a Hollywood premiere in which he introduces caricatures of the stars. Mischievously but not bitterly, he pictures the people of the studios — Greta Garbo, Douglas Fairbanks, Chaplin, Marie Dressier, the Barrymores and the rest — and subtly satirises their peculiarities as they react variously to Mickey's antics on the screen. Disney is one of the few really individual artists in films, and his work is nearer to cinema proper than that of most orthodox directors. His break into caricature is further proof of his brilliantly imaginative mind and his devotion to the cause of development through experiment. F. H.
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