Documentary News Letter (1944-1945)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER if you understand the mechanics of it. There is an unnecessary framework of a soldier who is worried about his wife having her first child, and how he is consoled and brought to a realistic understanding of the process by his very unusual M.O. The film has obviously been mucked about with for reasons of policy and, as always in cases 'like this, suffers. But anyway, the film is perfectly directed and photographed. The diagrams are excellent. To blame are the people who did not have the courage to tell the disgraceful story of infant mortality in Scotland. Personnel Selection, Recruits, from the Shell Film Unit, deals with personnel selection in the British Army, and is another brilliant example of documentary's growing power of handling people as well as ideas. The film gives an extremely comprehensive idea of exactly how the Army dealt with the problem of fitting square pegs into the squarest possible holes. Faced with . an enormous intake of men with all sorts of i aptitudes and varying levels of intelligence the Army devised tests of many kinds to sort the men i, out. The results of these tests give the Personnel Selection Officers a basis on which to work. The process is a thorough one and we are shown it in great and interesting detail; when demands come from different branches of the Army the Selection Department is ready with the right men for the right job. The film is so well made that one's interest is held right through although the film is a long one. This is not only due to the great care that has been taken to make every thing clear and comprehensible but is mainly because of Geoffrey Bell's very sensitive and human handling of the people in the film. The introduction . of the tests for A.T.S. rather impeded the easy flow of the story and the very frightening sort j ing machine was never quite put across. Homes for the People (Basic Films for the Daily Herald) is directed by Kay Mander and photographed by the late Pat Gay. This is a vigorous film covering an aspect of the subject already familiar to many, but by no means an | easy one to tackle. Five housewives present the ! case for better housing in a series of interviews I with the camera, their common experience of housing inadequacies suffered by so many people in Britain being the peg on which to hang a general survey of the situation. Rightly, none of these housewives is a glamour girl in any sense of : the word; but, while the points each has to make are quite well put over, there is a monotony, . almost a whine about their approach to the problems. A touch of robust humour in at least one of the interviews, apart from being representative of a very real trait in national character, would have emphasised — by bringing into greater relief — the circumscription of living under bad housing conditions. This film is a valuable aid to the ever-growing demand for national housing and should do much to encourage action in that direction. The Crown Film Unit present Father and Son, an editing job based on material shot by Leon I Schauder in the village of Tukumbu near Mombasa, in East Africa. The film deals with the battle between modern medicine and old magic, I compass and chart as opposed to hoping for the best. Protaganist of the modern world is a young African sailor who returns from the Navy to visit his father who is a village elder. By simply stating the facts and leaving the audience to draw its own conclusions the film does an excellent job of posing a problem and its effect is only marred by the efforts of the commentator to dramatise the already sufficiently interesting subject. For Strand Carl Heck directed Chinese in Britain. The film, by drawing parallels between Chinese and British activities, gives a pleasant picture of their lives in this country and their achievements here. To the March of Time, the thorny problem of Palestine and Jewish immigration presents no terrors: they rush in with a presentation that completely ignores any considered views that the Arabs might hold. But for its failure to present a balanced argument, this issue, Palestine Problem, would rank as one of the best for some time. It is very well edited, with a high photographic quality, and gives an intelligent presentation of Jewish Palestinian achievements in trade, agriculture and social organisation. Their other film. Battle for Beauty, may well prove to be one of the comedy hits of the year. Dedicated to the idea that American women regard the achievement of beauty as an end in itself this issue contains enough humour, conscious and unconscious, to send an average audience into convulsions. Coming so shortly after Teen-Age Girls, one feels that the March of Time is not doing quite its best for good AngloAmerican relations. FEATURE DOCUMENTARIES there have been many long documentaries in 1945. Burma Victory, without overlooking the strategic aspects of the subject, gives an inspiring and moving picture of the men who sweated and fought in that grim campaign. This is a magnificent film. The True Glory, made by Carol Reed and Garson Kanin, was, quite apart from its other excellent qualities, distinguished by an inspiring and imaginative sound track. The pictures were finely chosen and assembled but were given a great and extra emotional impact by the beautifully written and spoken comments by the men of the Allied Forces plus a very great music score by William Alwyn. This film will last as an impressive record of the last months of the war. In Journey Together John Boulting brings great directorial skill to the story of the training of a bomber crew and their subsequent part in a raid on Berlin. Only a certain amount of indecision in the scripting prevent Journey Together from being a memorable film but cannot stop it from being a solid achievement and a fine record. Today and Tomorrow from World Wide has had an excellent reception on its first showing and we reserve comment for our next issue when we shall be able to give it more space. We also hope that Paul Rotha's new film, Land of Promise, will be available for review at the same time. One of the most exciting films of the year is Diary for Timothy, from the Crown Film Unit. Directed by Humphrey Jennings, produced by Basil Wright, photographed by Fred Gamage, commentary by E. M. Forster and music by Richard Addinsell, this, like the True Glory, is the story of the last months of the war, but is set on this side of the Channel. It is told to baby Timothy, born on the fifth anniversary of the outbreak of war, in the form of a diary. The diary has four main characters: a wounded fighter pilot, a farmer, a coal miner, and a railway engine driver. The film tells of the battles and bad working conditions of the miners, the buzz bombs and the prospects for a better world in the future. But when Timothy grows up and sees his diary, he will not get a clear, wide or practical impression of what men did and felt in the last months of the second European war. What Timothy will see, though, is a film made by a director with rare imagination and skill. Humphrey Jennings, even if his thoughts are not quite clear in this particular film, uses sounds and pictures so ably that it does not matter much what the film is about. An unemotional boy's voice singing "Adeste Fidelis" played against a pan from steely cold water and frozen rushes up to a frozen landscape and up again to finish on a close-up of a frozen branch; a seventy-foot long close-up of a baby blowing bubbles, with the sound of a choir singing. The film is so packed with ideas and experiments, skill and enthusiasm, that all you can do is to raise your hat to Jennings, and wish that he had had a clearer theme to work on. You will also want to raise your hat to Fred Gamage whose photography is above even the Crown Film Unit's standard. Diary for Timothy is good for general audiences, and excellent for anyone interested in films. Perhaps because Norway stands out in the minds of most people as having shown integrity — that rare quality on the political field of World War II, Return of the Vikings (directed by Charles Frend, produced by Michael Balcon) easily captures a sympathetic interest in its subject — the part played by Norway during the war. Reconstructed sequences of life and training in the Norwegian Army, in hospitals and rest hostels, contrast with scenes of the Norwegian countryside, of service-shot material of the Allied bombing of Gestapo headquarters in Oslo, of the whaling ships — perhaps the most outstanding sequence. It opens the film and introduces Gunnar the harpoonist. (His adventures after the invasion of Norway, when he joins the Norwegian Army and goes on a secret mission, tell the story of the film.) One might even say that a virtue is made of having to use different levels of photographic quality, and there is a variety in the treatment of sequences. But there is also a tendency for this variety to break down into shapelessness and the film is too long, largely it seems from a determination to refer to every aspect of the subject pictorially. This is a pity, because the handling of one or two brief sequences was sensitive and compelling. One which sticks in the mind shows Gunnar about to meet his wife and child who have escaped from Norway. They await him at a Norwegian centre in London. The simple shot of a door of a room, hiding his loved ones, becomes invested with his feeling of restrained impatience. And when they do meet? They embrace quietly. It's their small son who, unconcernedly, becomes the centre of feeling for them both — never in his few young years having met the father who now holds him, he is more interested in the paratroop insignia on this strange man's uniform. As sensitive a handling of human relationships comes in Painted Boats (also from Ealing, directed by Charles Crichton, photographed by Douglas Slocombe). Barge-bred girl and boy are beset with problems of national service on unfamiliar land. The film, very well photographed and cut, has made us feel, with the girl, for the magic of living between slowly, steadily drifting banks of countryside, never tedious because always changing, and punctuated with the ritual of the locks. Painted Boats and Return of the Vikings are very creditable examples of the now accepted incursion of the documentary idea into the second-feature world (they held the attention of West End audiences). Upon them the British feature directors of tomorrow are cutting their {continued on page 10)