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170 CELLULOID
love story — just as Africa is the peg upon which to hang Trader Horn. Only on the rarest occasions has the War been considered interesting enough to carry the weight of a film on its own shoulders, and then not as an epic, but as a documentary record like the excellent but seldom-mentioned early British pictures, The Somme, Armageddon, Zeebrugge, Mons, and others in the same series. When we come to think of it, these films, together with the well-known Secrets of Nature series, are the real tradition of the British film industry, and I know of none that has equalled their' merits save perhaps one or two of the German warrecord pictures produced about the same time.
It is from these documentary films, with their fine record of reconstructed war events, that Tell England has principally sprung, and it is by the actual war scenes of bombardment and attack and hand-to-hand combat that Tell England will be remembered in the years to come. If this film has achieved nothing else, at least it tells with startling reality of the terrible tragedy that was Gallipoli and of the utter hopelessness of the War.
For all intents and purposes Tell England is the first sincere attempt by a film director to project any of the main war offensives on to the screen in its true proportions and perspective. Not one of the war farces from Elstree, not one of the fictitious war exploits centred round a popular star from Hollywood, not even the bigness of Hell's Angels, the thrill of The Dawn Patrol, or the noise of All Quiet on the Western Front have achieved this aim. None of these films — with the possible exception of the last-named — is fit to be