BAROMETER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 444, 26 December 1947, Page 24

BAROMETER

| Fair to Fine: "School for Secrets" |

(continued from previous page) morning! But a check-up proved me wrong. Cologne had its first big raid in early summer, I suppose it is just possible that exR.N.Z.A.F. types may find one or two small errors of fact in the documentary sequences, but they will have to be on their mettle to do so. The same might be said of the film’s version of the Bruneval commando raid. The behaviour of officers and other ranks in this episode kept it well up to the standard of the street-and-village-fighting cameos which were, for many New Zealanders, welcome highlights in the dull curriculum of basic training a few years ago. That is to say, it showed every evidence of having been done by professionals whose lives had depended more than once on their ability to do just this kind of job perfectly. Turning from these professionals to the amateurs whose names appear on the billboards, it is no less than just to say that’ (whatever the defects in the handling of the story) they all perform most capably. Despite the disadvantages of his part-or perhaps because of them --Richardson impressed me most. But Laurie and Huntley run him close and the former, as a Scots physicist, gave me the best laugh of the evening. "Who," he asks his wife, as he turns over a buff envelope in his hand, "who do we know who would spend money on a telegram?"