Documentary News Letter (1940)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER MARCH 1940 NEW DOCUMENTARY FILMS Five British Council Films Thoroughbred (Pathe Pictures. Editor: A. Curtice). Swingmg the Lambeth Walk (Len Lye on Dufay color). War Comes to London (British Movietonews. Editor : Gerald Sanger). Britain Shoulders Arms (British Paramount News. Editor: G. T. Cummins). These Children Are Safe (The Strand Film Company). Reviewed in detail, in DNL, February. By a Publicity Officer Thoroughbred is a pleasant, county-ish, very pre-war, film about English horses being the best in the world. Its camerawork is excellent. Its story is intelligently told. It has everything: pearlies' ponies in Regent's Park for the Van Horse Parade ; shire horses on the stud farm; ploughing matches over once-idle acres ; trouble at Tattenham Corner ; four-in-hands on the Windsor road ; and my special friends, the brewers' handsome drayhorses. Swinging the Lambeth Walk, though a long way ahead of most of us, is pre-war, too. This is one of Mr Len Lye's screen experiments in setting colour to music. I have poor eyes. In giving me a headache this film may have robbed me of objectivity. I allow its technical interest : I don't see its cultural value at this moment. War Comes to London shows what happened when crisis reached climax; headlines getting bigger, faces getting longer, photographers doffing caps to Cabinet Ministers in Downing Street (always a bad sign), caterpillars of evacuee children threading their way to stations, gasmasks being lost, sandbags being filled. . . . Despite skilful editing, the film is a bit jerky : in the manner of a collection of newsreel shots. That is forgivable. The fault of War Comes to London is that the story of the quickening of a nation's pulse is told without the speeding up of the film's own tempo. The film has one terrific moment : when, fifteen minutes after the tired voice of Mr Chamberlain has told waiting millions that they are at war, the sirens wail for the first time and London takes cover. In on-the-spot reporting like this, film has everything else in the guard's van. War Comes to London ends with columns of marching soldiers; Britain Shoulders Arms begins with them. But these soldiers are marching not to battle stations but from railway stations : marching home, weary of war, in 1918. Thereafter this nation laid down its arms and worked for peace, its most militant show the Aldershot Tattoo, its pacifism so passionate that when war loomed near military service had to be made compulsory. You know the theme — and you can't do much now about the parts you don't like. Paramount have taken on the difficult job of showing what happened before the lion took wings : when the lion wanted only to laze in the sun ; willing even to share the sun (so long as it had the biggest share) ; but not, it finally appears. willing to be pushed into the shade. The film manages to show the lion, its tail tied up in any number of knots, stirring. And, stirring from the comatose, the animal is not uninteresting. There are brilliant shots of the Aldershot Tattoo by floodlight; close-ups of the army mechanising; pictures of Britain swinging into action. And a crisp commentary manages to avoid jingoism. "We've got the men . . ." etc., is discovered to be just as effective pianissimo. These Children Are Safe, a little over-sentimentalised by Professor Hilton's commentary, is the best rounded film of the lot (which makes it odd that it should need to be cut to one reel before going abroad). Nevertheless these last three films do present a Britain with something to say for itself, and most of it worth saying. War Songs of China. Distribution: Progressive Film Institute. 1 reel. THE SONGS are sung first by a soloist, illustrated by the words, pointed by our old friend the dancing ball, and then by a chorus, illustrated either by natural scenes or, in one case, by cartoon. The cartoon is remarkable, in that it is cut closely to the words and in draughtsmanship and technique has an authentically Chinese quality. Quite apart from the musical interest, the cartoon sequence makes the film well worth seeing. The 400 Million. Production: History Today, Inc. Direction: Ivens and Ferno. Editing: Helen Van Dongen. Music: Hans Eisler. Commentary: Dudley Nichols. Speaker: Frederic March. 5 reels. JORis IVENS AND JOHN FERNO havc made a great film. They have covered a war which is being fought on a dozen, ill-defined fronts : they have suggested some of the history that went to the making of the war and they have sketched in some of its wider implications. Finally they have told their story in one hour of moving, lucid and beautifully photographed film. They could have made it the easy way. A few shots of babies' shattered bodies, some well-chosen, noble faces, the enemy advancing across the fields and some frightened refugees, and yet another war would have been "put across". But the makers chose the more difficult method. The film was obviously carefully and comprehensively shot and although perhaps it appears to have been shaped in the cutting room rather than on paper, it has a definite form. And it is a form which seems particularly appropriate to such a vast and straggling battle. Like the campaign itself the film organises the disorganised, now following a thread out from Chiang Kai-Chek's headquarters to the borders of Manchuria, then returning to the centre and working out again to the East. But all the time it is showing the tenacity of purpose of a great nation fighting for its freedom and the rapid building up of a new and determined ' spirit. There is no false emotionalism. The pictures have been left to speak for themselves and in allowing this the makers have chosen well. The wise and lovely face of Madame Sun Yat Sen, the young and fervent political speakers in the towns, and the indomitable spirit which is implicit in every movement of the Chinese soldiers speak for freedom and the spirit of China in a way that no commentator or cleverly contrived sound track could ever achieve. This film brings a war to life. The newsreels have given us the bombing of the big cities. Now we are taken into the towns and villages. On to the plains where the stone gods sit; into the fields where the reaper drops his sickle at the hurried call and takes up his rifle from its hiding ' place in the straw; into the shattered village where the housewife hunts for the grinding stone among the debris of her shattered home. This is the picture of a country at war. It is no longer the land of the willow pattern plate or of the Good ' Earth ; there is a new will and a new purpose in China today. China is being reborn and it is the great virtue of the 400 Million that this feeling of regeneration is conveyed in every foot. jli ilir siio Ml Crisis in the Pacific. March of Time No. 10, Fifth Year. Distribution: R.K.O. Radio Pictures. Running time: 18 minutes. ONE OF THE handicaps under which March of Time labours is that most people find it hard to dislike any of its items. The reel has so polished and refined its own formula that the critical facul ties of the audience are disarmed by the speed and courageous assurance with which the com^ mentator whisks them from one idea to the next As they get their breath at the end of the film, they are conscious of a glow of self-satisfaction at having joined in the pursuit of so much information. The audience is rarely left in a mood to reconsider at leisure the crowd of facts, which have been presented. The persisting imi pression too often is that they have seen a March of Time which was very good, rather than thai they have seen a fact film on a subject of majoi importance: the style makes more impressior than the subject matter. March of Time's latest release begins with ar analysis of the strategy of the war in Europe then moves on to the more terrible war stil raging in China ; from China it leaps to Tokio t( warn us that Europe's preoccupations are then regarded as favourable to a year of wide) Japanese conquest in 1940. From Tokio we pro ceed to Hongkong to be reminded that Britain' China Squadron can now look for few reinforce, ments from home. From Hongkong the stor takes us to the United States, which March c Time says is the one nation whose support c Britain in the Pacific may act as a check o Japan's militarists. But, we learn, the Unite, States has been supplying Japan with a la proportion of the raw materials of conques Moreover, for fear of ofTcnding Japan, Congre;, ^ has rejected a bill for the militarisation c America's island of Guam, the complete fortifiG tion of which is regarded by the U.S. Navy < essential to American power in the Pacific. So tl film settles down at last in Guam for its princip sequences. We gather that in spite of Congress tl U.S. Navy will somehow manage to fortify tl at m tie ma icol Ell M Ml iiii m al