Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

174 CELLULOID up by the power of the remainder of the film. However skilfully the story of Ray and Doe may have been bound up with the Gallipoli campaign, the two were bound to fall apart. Broadly speaking, the brilliance of Tell England lies in the scenes of the two landings and in Doe's capture of the Turkish trench mortar. The first of the landings takes place when the boys are still in the home country and purports to show the heroic efforts of the Anzacs, whilst the second centres round the famous attack of the 29th Division from the " River Clyde." /It is in these terrific spectacles that the combined talent of Geoffrey Barkas, an experienced director of war record films, and Anthony Asquith, an exponent of modern methods of cutting, puts on the screen something w7hich has never been done before. From the moment we see the great black battleships belching their smoke across a clouded sky, surrounded by launches and pinnaces, the film grips our imagination. Shot succeeds shot with the rapidity of rifle-fire. The shelling of the beaches, the landing of the boats, the manoeuvring of the lighters, the dropping troops under a hailstorm of bullets, the struggle up the entrenched hills, the Turkish snipers, the sweeping death-rain of the machine-guns, the handto-hand combats in the gullies, the glimmering light on the water, the whimpering of bullets, the shrieking of shrapnel, and the crackling splutter of machineguns — all this is magnificently taken and assembled in such a manner that it sweeps the audience into the screen by its energy. Once the Dublin Fusiliers have landed from the