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THE FILM SINCE THEN
adapt stage-plays of West End successes to the screen. With the possible exception of the submarine film, We Dive at Dawn (1943), he has not fulfilled the hopes one had of him after Tell England in 1930. Korda, when he directs a film personally, is a livelier director than most of those he hires, though his taste is inclined to a genteel refinement (An Ideal Husband, 1947). Rembrandt (1936) was a thoughtful picture, however, and one which it is still a pleasure to look at in Korda's favour, thanks also to Perinal's photography and Vincent Korda's settings.
Gabriel Pascal's versions of Shaw need no comment here. They are on the British conscience. Laurence Olivier's Henry V (1944) was probably the first instance of a legitimately photographed play, inasmuch as its structure was designed constantly to remind the spectator of the fact that it was a play and not a film. When the action moved out of the Globe Theatre, it moved into fairyland, not actuality, and thus avoided that conflict between poetic speech and three-dimensional reality that has set all previous versions of Shakespeare at nought. Michael Powell's Edge of the World (1937) was an interesting, if slightly arty, semi-documentary, but his subsequent collaboration with Emeric Pressburger has resulted for me in second-hand Hollywood, plus a dubious social outlook of the ' Churchillian renaissance '. Undoubtedly a very gifted technician, Powell still seems unable to make up his mind as to what he wants to say. David Lean and Noel Coward's In Which We Serve (1942) was a condescending instance of class-consciousness, and Messrs. Coward and Lean continued this approach in This Happy Breed (1944) and Brief Encounter (1945).1 Lean's Great Expectations (1946) was a handsome version of Dickens, except that it blurred and minimised the most meaningful protagonist, Magwitch. It revealed Lean, however, as a brilliant technician, sensitive and serious about cinema, probably the most skilful of all the young British directors, obviously waiting for real material of contemporary
1 Again, I think, an underestimate of the latter film. — P.R.
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