World Film and Television Progress (1938)

IT would be very unfair to Cavalcanti and Watt to bespatter North Sea with indiscriminate eulogies, for it is a film which merits close and constructive criticism. Nevertheless, after seeing it several times I can feel no inclination towards any comprehensive iconoclasms, for in essentials it is as right as rain ; it rates right at the top for drama, sincerity, and for a big step forward in the history of the documentary film. To the reconstruction of a real-life incident and to the presentation of a highly organised and everyday process it brings not only the intimate observation of ordinary men about their work, but also the accurate (and therefore so much more moving) presentation of the behaviour of ordinary men — can you or I, sophisticated citizen-readers, dare hope to identify ourselves? — in a time of mortal danger. With all due deference to the storm, which is the real thing, beautifully shot and cut, and makes The Hurricane look like something at Drury Lane; with even more deference to Jones and Fowle, whose camerawork, under obviously fantastic difficulties, is fine without being precious; with superlative deference to the G.P.O. itself, which not only paid for the film but also provided the intricacies of the ship-to-shore wireless service on which the whole story revolves; with deference in fact to all the people and things who helped, it is really in the direction of the dialogue sequences, in studio or on location, that the major importance of the film resides. A new style emerges, and a new technique. The actors act, but they are not actors; the director interferes with the most intimate realities, and yet by the imposition of his own ideas achieves a reality more vivid still. Here is a line of action which should, and I hope will, mean a new injection of life into the inert and comatose brainpans of the British studios. There are hundreds of similar subjects to hand, the box-office receipts are assured, and the public will be getting something it really wants. It is significant that adverse criticism of North Sea directs itself almost entirely against those sequences least concerned with human intimacies. True, the overslow opening of the film, and the occasional overplaying of the dramatic hand, as in the black-pudding sequence, are more personal. But the major faults, such as the underdeveloped fishing sequence, the embarrassing Sunday hymnsinging (if religion had to be used, need it have been so sentimentally C. of E., with all the grim richness of Covenanting Scotland at Watt's disposal), and the final sequence of all — a sort of tacked-on advert for the Post Office which almost (it cannot entirely, thank goodness) destroys the drama of the last shot of the film, when the radiooperator tunes back to his routine work — all these do not affect the main importance, nor do they ultimately invalidate the fierce human appeal which I hope the public, the producers, and the exhibitors will actively remember. I for one have seen few things so dramatic as the skipper asking for a salvage tug after his aerial has, unknown to him, been destroyed; he speaks, urgently but without panic, to a wilderness of sea and sky and to an unresponsive ether, while the ship rolls and creaks beneath him with a 170 NORTH SEA aJ YELLOW JACK Reviewed oy Dasil Vvrignt renewed menace in her clogged and damaged innards. One would have been glad to see Yellow Jack treated in the same way, for it deals with a subject of more than equal importance andwiderimplications.Itisthestoryofthemen who made possible, through their researches and practical work in Cuba, the building of the Panama Canal, by the stamping out of yellow fever. Until it could be proved beyond any shadow of doubt that the infection could be carried only by a stegomyia mosquito which had previously bitten an infected person, there was no way of preventing the wiping out of whole communities, towns and districts with the suddenness and finality of one of Egypt's plagues. It is a really exciting story, first, in terms of detection and the elimination of all suspects save one, and secondly of the proof, to achieve which a band of army volunteers must risk their lives by exposing themselves to every form of aggravated infection. Bob Montgomery, retaining his Irish accent from Night Must Fall, is the chief volunteer, and indulges in an incredibly silly and tenuous love affair with the local nurse, none other than the beauteous Virginia Bruce in a welter of starch, stripes and blondeness. This you see, is where Hollywood comes a cropper, by its inability to realise that it is no good bill-posting a love affair on to the backside of a script about scientific research and heroism; it must either be an integral part of the plot, or scrapped without compunction. Yellow Jack is, in general, not a well made film; much of it is slow, undistinguished, and clogged with bad dialogue. But it does make the grade when the scientific story is allowed to come to the fore, because the presentation is sufficiently sincere to give us a sense of the implications of the work, and because of the brilliant shooting of the villain stegomyia itself, which whizzes in a sinister fashion across the screen, and, magnified to the nth degree, injects its fatal cargo into the skin of research doctor and humble soldier alike.