The World
Till We Meet Again
ALILTING note of pessimism about our world runs through this film, which is about two people
who are sentenced to death in their different ways, and though the film producer could have saved them from time to time he lets them rightly die.
George Brent plays the part of a man sentenced to death for a murder who is being taken back to meet bit sentence on board a liner from Hong Kong to San Francisco. The detective who had trailed him (Pat O'Brien) across the world after his break-out of prison accompanies him but allows him the liberty of the boat. In love with him is Joan Ames (Merle Oberon) who herself has a medical sentence or death from a failing heart. She met hint in a bar in Hong Kong, but the whole drama takes place at sea save for a short spell in the mountains of Honolulu I WONDERED why the film skirted real tragedy and then decided that ii was because of the romanticism of the relationship of the two people, and because the grip of the flint depended on our not knowing whether the condemned man would escape or Pot.
There was nothing Inevitable about what happened to them, and when they said goodbye for the last dare, giving each other a rendezvous in a Mexican hotel, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had been there, though chat really fell out was that their absence was there. two ghosts were made to seem there in the balloons and shouting.; of a New Year Festival.
THAT was one of the two best points in A the film. The other was some spoken lines by the detective (Pat O'Brien) when he looked sadly at the water slipping past the ship and said that he had seen plenty of life but more and more he thought that human destiny could not be complete in this world owing to the hideous follies and cruelties men practised on men. About another world, answered the tired Comtesse de Bresac (Binnie Barnes), she could not feel
sure anywhere could be decent where human beings were.
The theme was not harped on with the paper flowers of romance and perhaps this pessimism, I thought, had something to do with the war. But I prefer it to the optimism of the saxophone. B. W.
Warners
Dancing on a Dime
HERE is a theatre imbroglio with hard-hit " artistes who decide to put on a show of their own and are enabled to do so by finding a large wad of phony fifty dollar bills. These they palm off on the theatre controller as rent, and the excitement consists in burgling his safe and putting in real money in place of the phony bills when they have raised the sum owed by box-office returns on the first night of the show.
In this way everything goes well and Lone Fenton (Grace McDonald) marries Ted Brooks (Robert Paige) as no one doubted from the first moment of seeing them, for they were the only two who could have married.
The main attraction of this film will be considered to rest in the quick changes of variety and dancing, but the most fascinating point to me was the problem of usury it stated in its extreme form. In fact, if banks cart lend out an interest more money than they have there is a sense in which their credit is not real money. The theatre people in this film get interest on credit that is not real, but their action is
a crime according to police law. The film producer maintains they are honest people, and he is glad that they escape the police, rejoicing with us all.
Mr. Eric Gill, could he bring himself to it, really ought to review this film.
B .W.
Plaza
,Sporting Blood
MAUREEN O'SULLIVAN and Lewis Stone bring a touch of distinction to an otherwise very ordinary Mtn which well proclaims the limits of its interest in the title.
No very great power of divination is required to realise that this is a story about the sport of kings and the pedigree blood which men are content to share with racehorses and dogs.
The film is American, so the territorial background is Virginia. As the most obvious sentimentality concerns horses and the throes of mares foaling (some of the best shots are of horses in training and the big race), and Maureen O'Sullivan gives a most convincing portrait of a young girl in love —who knows it—is unashamed qf it, and of her determination to get her man in holy wedlock, the film should have the success this formula usually has.
B. P.
Empire