Cinema Quarterly (1934 - 1935)

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The complete forum of the G.P.O. directors worked on the film and, while the influence of John Grierson is always apparent in its penetrating approach and perceptive treatment, it is possible occasionally to detect individual styles. Camera and microphone are used with masterly freedom and the regional station sequence, attributed to Evelyn Spice, is a notable example of the unselfconscious union of sight and sound. A special credit goes to Stuart Legg, who organized, unified, and did much to weld together the mass of semi-related fragments. The Voice of Britain, the most ambitious of the G.P.O. Unit's films, is a solid and successful achievement, the product of insight, initiative, and enthusiasm. F. H. BLACK FURY Production: Warner. Direction: Michael Curtiz with Paul Muni and Karen Morley. Length: 7591 feet. Why Warner Brothers, profitably engaged in the manufacture of melodramas and leg-shows, should turn and grapple on a plane of high seriousness with a social evil, as they did once before in / Am a Fugitive, is one of the minor mysteries of American filmmaking. Whatever prompted it, we must be grateful for this gallant flight from unreality to Coaltown and salute an honesty that makes no attempt to disguise the dreariness of the miners' row. The setting is Pennsylvania, but the atmosphere of industrial squalor created by the faithful documenting of pit shafts, strikers' processions, groups of haggard women and children on doorsteps, cheap pubs, and protest meetings in smoky halls differs little from that of British and Continental black countries. One element localizes it — the diversity of the miners' racial origin. Joe Radek, a part which Paul Muni with his peasant's physiognomy is ideally fitted to interpret, stands for that pathetic mass of semi-illiterates, a generation or so removed from the soil of Continental fields, who support the complex fabric of American civilization by their labour in Uncle Sam's mines and factories. It is a type worth representing on the screen, and Muni's portrait has a stark verisimilitude beside which most of the others appear artificial and shadowy. The strike-bearing racketeers and mine-owners are, for example, mere puppets conveniently introduced to assist the development of the plot. Most mining films (among them such a notable contribution to peace propaganda as Kameradschaft) take the line of least resistance and make their highlight a pit disaster. Black Fury digs its drama from material which at first sight looks as intractable as 238