... X By John Courtenay IN reviewing the year on the London stage, let me put the news in the first paragraph. Thus: the best productions in their various departments were Priestley's The Linden Tree, among straight plays; Oklahoma! as a musical; Born Yesterday and The Chiltern Hundreds as comedies; Saint Joan as a semi-classical revival; Tuppence Coloured as a revue; The Alchemist ...

... By C. A. Lejeune IT is an old and well-tried custom at this time of year for a critic to sit back and recall the films that have given him the greatest pleasure during the past twelve months of office. He then takes out a piece of paper and a pencil, and draws up, with many erasures, a list of The Ten Best Films of the Year, or My Favourite Dozen; after which he commits the list to typewriter, ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF Rupert Croft-Cooke ONE FINE DAY.-- The publishers claim for this novel that it is a little masterpiece, and for once it seems that the phrase is justified. Indeed, the danger is to avoid gushing. I could reel off a dozen epithets and stand by each of them-- it is ex quisite, moving and profound. It is a harder matter altogether to convey the inner life of the book, or even to ...

... -ffiocA BEVERLEY BAXTER. THIS is the Christmas Number of The Sketch, and the Editor, like the conductor of an orchestra, turns his mesmeric baton upon his contributors and calls for Yuletide music. It is true that Christmas is not yet here, but editors don't mind that kind of thing. Dickens, of course, was the great exponent of the Christmas spirit. If he had an assignment such as mine to-day, ...

... THE Winter Garden Theatre is not very far from the Aldwych. This farce will send many people back to those nights of the roaring 'twenties when Ben Travers, our most astute writer in the theatre's most difficult medium, would chivvy Lynn, Hare, Walls, and the rest through a few hours of moonstruck bliss. True, the present plot is something to do with the black market; true, alas, that Tom ...

... By John Courtenay. FINIAN'S RAINBOW (Palace) is not, after all, a strong partner for Oklahoma! and Annie. The programme calls it a different musical, and E. Y. Harburg and Fred Saidy must have worked like beavers on its libretto. That is the trouble: the libretto is altogether too elaborate. Besides bemg arch and winsome to a degree through the evening we must sail on a tide of blarney ...

... By C. A. Lejeune. SO WELL REMEMBERED.-- James Hilton's novel about a Lancashire mill-boy, who takes up a political career in a mood of high idealism, but finds that his wife's social ambitions don't square with his dreams of slum clearance. The film has been made in England under joint American and British auspices, with a collaboration of stars and technicians from the two countries. The ...

... I . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IT seems to be the fashion in certain critical circles at the moment to decry the romantic thriller, the spy him with a handsome hero, a glamorous heroine, and professional actors using make-up and all the trimmings, in favour of the dry, documentary, candid camera affair. There is held to be some special merit in a film that contains bits of newsreel, shots of the ...

... By John Courtenay. TRESPASS (Globe) is a play by Emlyn Williams to the time of A-haunting we will go. He chooses a castle in Wales, seated pleasantly in the middle of a lake, and appears him self as a Cardiff draper who is not the fake medium he thinks he is. We are with the blither spirits during the first half of the play-- thanks largely to Marjorie Rhodes, delightfully candid as a ...

... By C. A. Lejeune. THE WEB (Tivoli).-- One of the smaller but slicker Hollywood thrillers, done with a deliberation that almost makes its extravagant postu lates acceptable. A poor young lawyer is framed on a murder charge by the smooth business-man he has been hired to pro tect; a sleuth from the Homicide Squad uses his own methods to unveil the real killer. Vincent Price, as the business ...

... LES DISPARUS DE ST. AGIL THERE are three things, roughly speaking, that seem to be foolproof material for the screen-- running water, running horses, and of small boys. e screen has hardly ever made a mistake v, pictures of children in the mass, and there is mistake about the French film at Studio One, Disparus de St. Agil. The film is technically lis J, that must be allowed. It was made in ...

... TRANSFORMATION SCENE. By Claude Houghton. Mutatis mutandis, the same might be said of Mr. Claude Houghton's new novel. This is a kind of psychic detective-story. Who murdered Carol? Max Arnold, the painter, who tells the story, thinks he did, for the reasons that he dreamed he had, that he was a sleepwalker, and that he had long wished to break with Carol. She had been many men's mistress, ...