Celluloid : the film to-day (1931)

TELL ENGLAND 175 towed lighters, the remainder of the troops are loosed through specially prepared ports in the side of the " River Clyde " and run across the lighters, which have been brought into position to form gangways between the grounded ship and the shore. From the low, strongly-entrenched hill running round the back of the bay, from a thousand Turkish rifles and machineguns, a murderous rain of fire sweeps the beach and the lighters. It is said that the Turks fired ten thousand shots a minute during the first few minutes of the landing at " V " beach, and the film gives this impression. No war film yet produced has been more convincing than these scenes of the landings, not even the often-mentioned sequence in Pudovkin's End of St. Petersburg or the long tracking shots of the French attack in Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front. It is all the more unfortunate that such brilliantly produced scenes should have to be intermixed with a story of such poorness, in fact with a story of any kind. Yet again we who care for the cinema have to submit to the sight of splendid material being pulled down to the depths of bathos by the introduction of story-interest. We saw it in Hell's Angels, in The Dawn Patrol, and now again in Tell England. The situation is always the same. A film which by every recognized standard demands to be made as an epic, standing alone on its heroic material, is dragged down to the level of the ordinary feature picture. Tell England should have been the epic of Gallipoli, a great record in the greatest of all dramatic mediums of a campaign such as has never been equalled in bravery and determination, a lasting proof of how British troops