HIGH TREASON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 767, 2 April 1954, Page 21

HIGH TREASON

(Renk-Paul Soskin) AIS is, without a peradventure, the best British thriller I have seen since-well, since last I saw a gocd British thriller. I was about to say the best since Seven Days to Noon, but that passed through here in 1951. In the interim there may have been one or two of the same genre as 800d as this latest arrival, but my memory obstinately refuses to recall them. Comparison with Seven, Days to Noon is, in any case, inevitable: That was a Boulting Brothers production. High Treason is directed by Roy Boulting. Roy Boulting and Frank Harvey collaborated in the scripts of both films. One character — Inspector Folland of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch (played by André Morell)-is common to both stories, some of the minor players looked familiar, too, and in each case the plot concerns a plot against the Safety of the Realm. Seven Days was undoubtedly excitement on a grander scale, with its threat of the atomic obliteration of London, its crowded evacuation shots and the vast empty perspectives of the abandoned city which followed them. High Treason is about sabotage — in particular, ar attempt to destroy the great generating stations of Britain-but if it lacks the atomic dimension it comes disconcertingly closer to everyday experience. It is, of course, in that particular quality of documentary realism that Roy Boulting excels. His films are crowded with the kind of people you pass in the street, his themes are drawn from contemporary history. The crazed scientist of Seven Days to Noon was quite a credible creation to filmgoers still dazed by the appalling forces science had unleashed. The sabotage of High Treason is a similar extension of a current problem. It is géod cinema, I suppose, because it has that concentration of reality which (as Victor Hugo pointed out) is the essence of good theatre. That very quality, however, makes this picture more disturbing than a simple thriller. The communist "apparatus" for example, uses a chambermusic group as cover for its contact men and the picture of the chamber music enthusiasts is just too good to be false. (They even speak the language: "Beneath the cerebral," says their chairman, introducing an avant-garde string trio, "there’s loads of lyrical and heaps of jolly good tunes... ") A few more films as potent in their impact as this one and it would scarcely pay to be a card-carrying member of the local chamber music society. We are, of course, the prisoners of our time, but it would be pleasant to live once more in the days when spies were recognisably sinister characters found in books (or seen at the pictures), not corduroytrousered enthusiasts, such as one rubs shoulders with at Prom. concerts, or meek little home-loving men like the bloke who sits next you on the 8.5 every morning,