TOO MANY WAR FILMS?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 169, 18 September 1942, Page 17

TOO MANY WAR FILMS?

{lt would be interestingto know how many New Zealand picture-goers would agree with this article from a recent London "Observer" by Miss C. A. Lejeune, who is Great Britain’s leading film critic---G.M.] F you really want to see another American playboy perform feats of valour with the R.A.F. you can do so in Flying Fortress. At least, you can see him swarm along the fuselage in an oxygen mask and put out a fire behind No. 2 propeller. He does this partly, of course, for democracy and partly because the plot is sagging badly at this juncture. All the routine things are over and done with. The playboy has reformed reels earlier. His rival is now practically his brother-in-law. The blonde reporter has given him her heart and promised to be Mrs. James Spence, jun. The Flying Fortress has successfully bombed Berlin and nothing untoward has happened, not even Veronica Lake in the bomb-rack. Worse still, Squadron-Leader the Earl of Ottershaw (Sydney King, a player in quite small type) is making all the acting. It is obvious that the star (Richard Greene) must do something, and something pretty drastic, too. I might have liked Flying Fortress better if I had any reason to believe it was the last of these fictions, instead of just the fourth or fifth of what looks like becoming an imposing cycle. Flying Fortress is only one of the many British films, made or scheduled, with a war story. Some weeks ago I warned readers of what they might expect when Hollywood entered the war as an active belligerent. Now comes a report of two hundred American films, directly dealing with the war or with a war background, to be made and delivered within the next two years. %* Bg 3 FRANKLY, the- prospect appals me, and from all I hear I am not alone in my apprehensions. I have found a growing distaste on the part of picturegoers to spend time and money on films

that vary the same arbitrary situations and repeat the same copybook maxims, A significant paragraph appeared the other day in a film trade journal. When (the editor writes) are our producers going to get down to everyday realities and make some effort to give the public what they want? Isn't it about time they lost this complex of making so many war films, because, if they’ll g0 round London or the provinces, they’ll find patrons are getting heartily sick of them. I was talking to a West End manager yesterday, and he told me in-no uncertain terms that patrons when they go in say: "Is this a war film?"-and walk out: when they they learn it is. * * * Y-own belief is that it is not so. much the subject of war that grates on the customer as the. unreality of the treatment. Most of us, by this time, are experts in war. We are familiar with all the parts in this drama. We know from our own experience how people talk and behave and look "in war, and we are quick to detect’ anything phoney, to laugh at the false note or the mockheroic line. : You may have noticed how warmly an audience will respond to some small human scene in a war-film: a scene in which ordinary people, not particularly heroic or good looking, do ordinary things in an ordinary manner. There are several of these scenes in Unpublished Story. There is one, a blitz scene, in Flying Fortress. Here, for a few minutes, unstarred people-a child, civil defence. workers, a. taxi-driver-do what they have to do simply and unaffectedly. To my. mind, this one scene is worth all the others put together. Surely, to a wise producer, these reactions might be a pointer. It is probably unnatural to expect him to get away. from war topics altogether. The conditions in which he works are fiercely distracting. Nothing can seem immediately important compared with the ‘grim business around him. But if he must make war films, let them be about real, believable people. What moves us in drama is always the study of man and his hopes and struggles. Where and when he lives, what he does, whether he wears a uniform or overalls, doesn’t much matter. To the sober mind wars, even this war, are merely accidental and temporary. But a story which tells the truth about a man or woman-any man, any woman, anywhere — is topical till Doomsday and never out of place.