Under The Bam, Under The Boo, Under The Bamboo Tree

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 226, 22 October 1943, Page 14

Under The Bam, Under The Boo, Under The Bamboo Tree

you-could-bear-to-see-again Game would spread to the you-would-take-away-with-you-to-a-Pacific-Island, or its equivalent. May I add some comments? ; About films. We are agreed about the Petrified Forest, The Guardsman, Mayerling, Un Carnet de Bal and Winterset. That leaves me only two to come and go on. But while I’m in doubt about some of the excellent choices of Miss Lejeune and our own "G.M.," whether to take The Informer or The Grapes of Wrath or Citizen Kane or The Long Voyage Home, I’ve got a few options that haven’t been listed. What about Of Human Bondage, Street Scene, The Sea Wolf (Milton Sills version), The Doomed Battalion (Luis Trenker), The Emperor Jones? And what about All Quiet on the Western Front and Journey’s End? I suppose only those who have spent years in the movie industry know how thin most films wear after the umpteenth screening; but conversely "good" films wear like "good" books. I have seen several of the above a dozen times and would gladly go again to-night. And books. Here again I am struck by the remarkable agreement between critics with any pretensions to the name. Criticism of any sort requires a standard of values. I'd like to make the tripehounds read and reread their choices ] HAD a feeling that the Films-which-

month after month, year in and year out! And Id like some of "G.M.’s" critics to see their own films at special screenings where they went on and on and you couldn’t shut them off or walk home and take a dram before you went to bed. But though any of the lists of Sinclaire, Beagiehole or Gordon would do me quite nicely, there are some things" I would squeeze in even if I squeezed others out. I’d add Ibsen. and O’Neill (both Modern Giants) to the Shaw plays. I'd quibble about the poetry: taking van Doren’s Anthology of World Poetry instead of the Oxford Book or the Golden Treasury, and Seldon Rodman’s Anthology of Modern Poetry instead of the Faber Book. But I’d do worse than that. I’d have a _ loose-leaf file of reproductions of the world’s great paintings. I’d take a modern language course; Esperanto if I didn’t know it already, but since I do, Russian or German, I’d have the largest collection of songs I could find on the sane side of Tin Pan Alley. I’d take a fake volume that opened on a chess-board complete with men. And finally, I'd stipulate that the films come along too, plus family and a few friends. And "that the six months be prolonged to the term of my natural life.

ANTON

VOGT