... The Glass Slipper (St. James's) By Horace Horsnell IT cannot have been merely to avoid con fusion with other seasonable Cinderellas that Herbert and Eleanor Farjeon call their fairy-tale with music by its alternative title, The Glass Slipper. One feels that it was rather to mark differences than to disclaim kinship. The differences are fundamental. Their version amounts to a restoration, a ...

... ENTERTAINMENTS a la CARTE By JJLAN £OTT Bergner the Giant-Killer THE seven sons of Jesse, in their rude Judæan hut, have snarled over the scanty food, talked fearfully of Saul the mighty, condoled with their mother on the addled egg in her brood-- an eighth son who is timid and backward. Enter, then, a thin waif in rags, his high-pitched voice vibrant with eagerness. Mother, I have killed a ...

... TU By Herbert Farjeon The Blue Goose (Comedy) IF you want to get the feeling that there isn't a war on and that life in 1941 is pro ceeding just as evenly and calmly as it did (or did it?) ten years ago, a visit to the Comedy Theatre may possibly supply your need. Not that life as depicted in The Blue Goose is appreciably more like life in 1931 than it is now. It isn't. It doesn't nretend to ...

... REVIEWED BY ELIZABETH BOWEN FOR most of us, Germany is a nightmare subject. Instinctively the mind bends back from the picture of devastation, from the unanswered and perhaps unanswerable questions of this defeat. We do not like the odours from the abyss. Germany had it coming to her: well, it has come now. I suppose it would have been impossible, three or four years ago, halfway through the ...

... By Horace Horsnell Rain (St. Martin's) MR. SOMERSET MAUGHAM has a remark able gift for investing fiction with an air of truth. He exercises it, not only in his choice of themes, but in his treatment of them. His best stories seem so credible, their characters so real, that simple readers are persuaded he takes them direct from life. And since his point of view is seldom a soothing one, it is ...

... THE CINEMA Kins Konc$ By JAMES AGATE I SURMISE that this is one of those Kinquering Kongs immortalised by the late Canon Spooner. At any rate it kinquered me up to a point. But first I should like to record an impression which I very definitely received, the impression that the enormous crowd at the Coliseum had been gathered together not solely to witness an exciting film but to pay tribute ...

... ELIZABETH BOWEA „g BOOKS A Star Danced 44 flow Small a Part of Time 44 Merchant Airmen 44 44 With a Bare Bodkin 44 Leading Lady A STAR DANCED (W. H. Allen; 10s. 6d.) is Gertrude Lawrence's autobiography. Like everything else she has done, it is distinctive-- even in form, for it darts to and fro in time. We don't begin, for instance, with I was born. We begin with her dash back, by air, ...

... THE CINEMA A Ginger Rogers Solo By JAMES AGATE TIME and again I am compelled to admit that that ridiculous place Hollywood is at least clear-headed about its ridiculousness. If Hollywood wants a rollick ing comedy then it gives us a rollicking comedy. Re fusing to allow Sentimentality and Farce to make their exits and entrances in the same piece, Hollywood has a sense of balance and fitness ...

... The Banbury Nose (Wyndham's) By Horace Horsnell MR. Peter Ustinov must be getting tired of being told that he is a promising dramatist; but he is promising, if only in the sense that each new play he writes creates lively expectations of the next. He is young, though there is nothing callow about his work. Indeed, the striking thing about it is its maturity. l ne nesuauons or mcxpcncuuc of ...

... By Horace Horsnell Humply Duinpty (Coliseum) Cinderella (His Majesty's) PANTOMIME, like Punch, has never been what it was. The trouble is that, unlike Shakespeare and the Musical Brasses, it is not an acquired taste. Seen in youth, it is usually a case of love at first sight. Once an absolute monarch, as ribald as rollicking, King Panto has become a kind of constitutional cypher, and, like ...

... THE CINEMA Pre-war War Films By JAMES AGATE OVER and over again as I sat watching the preposterous but thrilling An Englishman's Home at the London Pavilion, my mind reverted to one of the greatest war films the cinema has ever thrown up. This was The Burgomaster of Stilemonde, adapted from M. Maeterlinck's play. Incidentally, a comparison between these two films proves that Euclid was wrong ...

... The Cinema Lowbrows and La Garb By JAMES AGATE BEFORE considering our old favourite, Greta Garbo, in a new film-- or should I say the new Greta in an old film?-- there are one or two reflections which I should like to offer on the old subject of the low-brow, his cause and cure. The first question we ought to ask ourselves is: Who wants him to be cured anyway? The poet Tennyson said, in a ...