THE GENTLE SEX

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 314, 29 June 1945, Page 19

THE GENTLE SEX

(Two Cities-G.B.D.)

ARLY everything that I said the other week in praise of The Way Ahead can also be said of this British film, and for much the same

reasons. It is another discerning group-| portrait, or more correctly, group-sketch, from wartime England, drawm with the same semi-documentary, semi-fictional technique, The subjects this time are seven girls-seven very different girls in background, upbringing, and economic status-who join the A.T.S. together, mess together, sleep together, learn to march and swing their arms together (and, brother, how they swing!), and then are posted to various assignments-one to wash dishes, others to drive lorries, others to operate aircraft-detector equipment with an A.A. Unit. Occasionally we get a glimpse of their private lives, but mostly the film is concerned with the routine activities of these young women in uniform. And even routine and monotony can be made interesting and _ even exciting to the onlooker, as for instance in that long sequence where some of the girls drive a convoy of lorries almost ‘the length of Britain. With its excellent use of background music, this sequence reminded me strongly of Grierson’s famous documentary Night Mail: it has the same quality of poetic realism. The Gentle Sex is primarily a woman’s picture: a story about women, acted almost wholly by women, and written by a woman (Moie Charles). But it was directed by a man, the late Leslie Howard: he deserves some credit for the whimsical humour of the commentary which his disembodied voice supplies, the touches of irony in the treatment and the sense of actuality which is only occasionally marred by a false note. J feel sure I was not the only member of my sex in the audience who enjoyed the ‘show-and particularly the female sergeant-major, surely the most fearsome object in all creation, eel