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certain conception of the Scots people. Both films contain allusions to aspects of Scots character seldom reflected on the screen. For example, in What Every Woman Knows, the railway porter's passionate enthusiasm for education is typical of a characteristic Scottish quality; and in The Little Minister we are shown something of the religious sectarianism characteristic of many Scots. What Every Woman Knows is the more faithful play transcription, some of Barrie's whimsicality having been transmuted to whining sentimentality in The Little Minister. Compensatory virtues in the latter film are its convincing Scottish atmosphere; the freedom given to an agile camera; and Katherine Hepburn's spirited and original reading of the part of Lady Babbie.
Britain also has been looking beyond her shores for film material. The Dictator, Toeplitz de Grand Ry's film of eighteenth-century Copenhagen, describing the romance of an ambitious but publicspirited Hamburg doctor and the young Queen of Denmark, Caroline Matilda, is sumptuous but hardly spirited, decorative but hardly deep. There is more flirting with history in Abdul the Damned. This is based on events in Turkey during and after the year 1908, and depicts Abdul Hamid, the autocratic but fear-ridden Sultan, being compelled by the Young Turks to sign a democratic constitution, and later, when he has temporarily brought the Old Turks back to power by branding their opponents with a political murder committed by his orders, being swept from the throne following a popular rising. There is good film material here; but the producers have confused this theme by introducing a conventionally melodramatic story of a threatened romance between a Viennese actress and a young Turkish officer, and the continual shifting of interest affects the suspense of the film, so that we are seldom gripped by its drama. Our interest is retained, however, by Fritz Kortner's study of a mind continually tormented by fear and suspicion ; and by Karl Grune's vitalising direction. Sanders of the River is also a film of life outside Britain. I cannot, like Paul Rotha, who reviews the film elsewhere, write from first-hand knowledge of its African authenticity or otherwise. But I find it something new and engaging in film entertainment, vigorous if naive in conception; and a remarkably effective exercise in editing and continuity, when the varied sources of the material are taken into consideration. It has life and movement and provokes some definite response, though these may all be lesser cinematic things than the achievement of representing the life of a people.
Meanwhile no one in this country makes films of Britain to-day. We have instead Drake, Me and Marlborough and Peg of Old Drury. And, of course, the Jubilee films.
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