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172 CELLULOID
kind, but it has built up a name for frankness and courageous enterprise. In Tell England we see the result of this policy, a policy that commercially may not have yielded a rich harvest but which has preserved prestige in the industry as a whole.
Almost any filmgoer of moderate observance could say that Tell England issued from the same studios as the Secrets of Nature, Stampede, The Windjammer, Underground and A Cottage on Dartmoor. Behind its panorama of war lie the flower-gardens and lanes, the public schools and universities of England. It has slightly the flavour of Rupert Brooke, of intellectual aestheticism, and of young men who write slim novels when they come down from Oxford. More than anything else, however, it is typical of the public school tradition, and it is this quality in the picture that kills its story. It is the work of a type of person not often associated with the film industry, and for this reason is not regarded with kindness by the rest of the trade. It is suspected. It is clever. The trade see in it something which they do not understand. They are shy of its spirit and excuse their embarrassment by saying that it is not a box-office picture. That is so typical of Wardour Street.
Even before it was made it was obvious that Tell England could not be a single, unified achievement. By the nature of its story it was inevitable that the finished film would fall between two stools. In truth, it was unwise of its makers to aim at two things, for they were destined to achieve neither.