We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
representation and re-creation of those must be pursued and is to be praised. If there is to be only a superficial resemblance to the original, then the film has no justifiable claim to the historical names and associations (and, incidentally, publicity value), and is no better than any other costume melodrama which is content with the cardboard kings and queens of Ruritania and Arcadia.
There is a social reason why the grossly-distorting historical film is to be condemned. Such is the composition of the movie audience that the majority will be unable from their own knowledge, to compare the impression given with the historical facts; and thus what is related on the screen will come to represent their entire knowledge of the incidents and characters described. Where the description is accurate — except perhaps for minor errors apparent only to the expert — the result will be educative and praiseworthy; but where the description is grossly inaccurate the result will be a regrettable dissemination of false information.
From this point of view, the quarter's two chief historical films are hardly faultless. In Catherine the Great we find no evidence of a ruthlessly ambitious woman who was probably a party to the murder of her husband, and who proceeded to rule thereafter with the brutality typical of the period. In Queen Christina we find a daughter of Gustavus Adolphus whose abdication to join a young Spanish envoy comes as a complete surprise to her people, and is accompanied by none of the sordid preliminary discussions recorded in history. I leave it to the experts to decide whether or not the producers are entitled to invite us to see Catherine of Russia and Christina of Sweden or whether they would have been more honest to claim no more than Ruritania as the background for some costumed romance.
Consideration of Catherine the Great apart, the quarter has produced no outstanding British films. Waltzes from Vienna has revealed Hitchcock's craftsmanship to be as expert as always, but the achievement of the film, an adaptation of the spectacular musical play, was limited from the beginning. Red Ensign has the virtue of being based on an original story. Handled with a sense of the theme's importance, the film might have told impressively the story of British shipbuilding, but Gaumont-British, ignoring the real-life drama of the delayed Cunarder on the Clyde, have been content to use the shipyards as a mere background for a rapid melodrama. Similarly, The Song of the Plough, though it sets its drama in the English countryside and takes some notice of the contemporary economic situation, is treated so ineptly that it fails to come alive. We are still no nearer to undertaking the task of " telling the rest of the world the truth about Britain" — a shortcoming about which Eric Knight so properly protested in his " Synthetic America."
1 80