MALTA STORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 763, 5 March 1954, Page 19

MALTA STORY

(Rank-Theta Films) © ILM directors and _= scriptwriters (like most other craftsmen whose job it is to translate ideas into words, or words into pictures) would, I irfagine, cheerfully admit that the end-product of their labours rarely coincides at all points with: the initial conception; : that, in fact, what the tacticians call "maintenance of objective" is a tricky business when dealing with such imponderables. It is, therefore, to the credit of the director, Brian Desmond Hurst, and his co-workers (among whom I must mention the photographer Robert Krasker) that Malta Story remains in all essentials the story of Malta and its people rather than a plausible fiction involving Jack Hawkins, Alec Guinness, Muriel Pavlow, Ralph Truman and such other expensive studio properties as occupy the foreground from time to time. I don’t. mean to minimise the work done by the players. Jack Hawkins gives an honest, unvarnished, convincing performance as the harassed Air Officer Commanding ("Malta’s an unorthodox place-we’ve got to make up our own words and music as we go along"); Anthony Steel, Ralph Truman, Renee Asherson, Muriel Pavlow all perform with competence in parts which have become the well-established conventions of the British war film. Even Guinness is conventional in his unconventionality-the archaeologist turned photo-reconnais-sance pilot. But what happens to them does not so deeply engage our emotions -their tribulations come rather as relief from the sharper agonies ‘around them. Three only of the cast have em‘bedded themselves deeply in the story: Flora Robson, whose pertrait of an island grandmother blends dignity with anguish; Hugh Burden, as the security officer, who must tell her that her son is a traitor; and Nigel Stock as the son. But there is no line of dialogue in the script so telling as the tingling silence interposed between ‘the ®%frenzy of an alert and the explosion of the first bomb, and no shot more eloquent than that in which the Maltese, standing silently

under the shdttered ramparts of their citadel, watch the grey fragments of a convoy limp into Grand Harbour. Malta Story contains an unusually high percentage of war film which not only records the fury of the assault on Malta itself, but ranges far out into the Mediterranean to include the ordeals of the convoys seeking to supply the island and (later) Malta’s counter-attacks against Rommel’s supply-lines. I have rarely seen more dramatic combat photography than the sequence showing one convoy under attack-nor can I recall the sight of so much anonymous death in so short a space. It always disturbs me when the records of war are used.to give substance to a trivial theme, but I felt no qualms here, for Malta Story is a story of courage, and the courage of plain people moves me more than an army with banners.