HELL'S CARGO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 49, 31 May 1940, Page 30

HELL'S CARGO

(A.B.P.) The story is by Leo Johnson. The direction is by Harold Huth. The three principal players are Walter Rilla, Kim Peacock, Robert Newton. They are commanders of a French, a British, and a Russian man-of-war, attached, it seems, to an international patrol in the Mediterranean. Into port comes an oil tanker. Trouble follows. The tanker slips out to sea, but not before the nature of her illegal cargo is discovered. The French warship is despatched in pursuit, with the British and Russian commanders on board as liaison officers. Caught, the owner of the tanker holds his crew at revolver point while he opens the cocks that allow the horrid cargo to flow into the sea, creating a poisonous gas against which gas-masks are ineffective. The Navy seems helpless. Who is to save the passenger steamer right in the line of the wind-blown gas cloud? Why! Are not the commanders brave men? Le Fortune steams at 40 knots through the gas and gets through, but only after the French and British commanders have coughed a great deal and the Russian, who was gassed in the last war, has died. But the French Commander’s wife, a passenger on the crippled liner, is saved, to stand for the final shot with glistening eyes while the Russian goes into an honourable but watery grave. Obviously, this is not propaganda. Obviously, it is not a Grade A picture. In spite of these handicaps, however, it manages to be fair entertainment. Slips: The "battleships" are destroyers. One shot of the gas cloud in-

cluded too much ship, spoiling the illusion that it was anything but a smoke screen.