... The Literary Lounger. By L. P. Hartley. Ninepenny Novels. Sir Ernest Benn has done a good turn both to the public and to the art of fiction with his new series of ninepenny novels. They are pleasant to the eye, light in the hand, and of a size (and a price!) convenient for the pocket. Moreover, they are short, only half the length of an ordinary novel. Whether this is to be accounted a virtue ...

... . By MICHAEL ORME. AN addition to London's Continental cinemas, the Berkeley (late the Lansdowne News Theatre), has opened with an adapta tion of Gerhardt Hauptmann's play Vor Sonnenuntergang. Significantly re-christened DER HERRSCHER, this German prize film unfolds the story of a struggle for supremacy between a wealthy widower, who finds renewed happiness with his young secretary, and ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. STAR MAKER is the most ambitious novel, if novel it can be called, that I ever read. Not only does Mr. Olaf Stapledon seek to justify, or, at any rate, to explain, the ways of God to man in a general way; he goes much further. He sends his soul into the infinite (only the universe is no longer regarded as infinite) to learn its secrets at first hand. While his body lies ...

... 4t the Sign of the Cinema. By MICHAEL ORME. TO acclaim Song of the Alps (Marble Arch Pavilion) as greater than The White Hell of Pitz Palu-- as has been done-- is, to my mind, to stultify appreciation from the outset. Except for the fact that both films are set amidst the pictorial grandeur and immensity of the Alps and are without dialogue, they are in no wise comparable. In The White ...

... Criticisms in Cameo. By J. T. Grein. i. GALSWORTHY'S WINDOWS, AT THE DUCHESS. I CANNOT restrain one general remark on this otherwise very efficient production of the People's National Theatre, for to withhold it would be tacitly to encourage a growing, nefarious habit. From where I sat, in the ninth row of the stalls, I could not hear more than half of what was said on the stage, so terrible ...

... . By MICHAEL ORME. THE trouble with a sequel to any suc cessful piece of work is that it is bound to run the gauntlet of comparison. THIS MAN IN PARIS (Plaza), which continues the adventures of the delightful couple, Pat and Simon Drake, whom we got to know in This Man is News, is about as good a sequel as we are likely to meet on the screen. Yet it does betray a slight effort to recapture ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. ADVENTURES of a Young Man is a pan oramic novel with a central figure, Glenn Spots wood, who moves from group to group. In this way we cover a great deal of the American scene, both geo graphically and socially; and anyone who wants to know what conditions among the American working class have been during the past ten years will find Mr. Dos Passos's book most ...

... Criticisms in Cameo. By J. T. Grein. i. CYNARA, AT THE PLAYHOUSE. ON the surface this is a chronicle of commonplace events told with minuteness of detail, some times graphically, sometimes diffusely, in the now accepted fashion of starting with a Prologue and working backwards until the dénouement. In brief, Jim Warlock and his Cynara (Clemency) are happily, placidly married. She, to shelter ...

... The Literary Lounger By L. P. Hartley. c The Sense of Taste. A scent, as we know, can quicken memory and evoke the past, and the same power, though in a lesser degree, dwells in the sense of taste. Did not Marcel Proust derive his theory of Art from the associations aroused by the taste of a madeleine biscuit dipped in tea? -a majestic edifice to be supported by so simple a found ation. A ...

... . Bv MICHAEL ORME. THE lure of undiscovered planets seems to be as great for screen as it is for real astronomers. Not long ago we had Fritz Lang's The Girl in the Moon. Now, in Just Imagine (Alhambra), that quietly appealing humourist, El Brendel, makes a stowaway journey in a fool-proof aerial rocket to Mars. But the film has other angles of entertain ment than its cinematic, if very ...

... . IN OLD CHICAGO (Tivoli), the Twen tieth Century-Fox reproduction of a dramatic and disastrous period in the history of a great city, is as impressive a picture from the point of view of spectacle as one could wish to see. Opening with the lumbering journey of yet another dear old covered waggon across the Western prairie, and the death of Pat O'Leary as the result of a race between his ...

... CINEMA. FILMS OF THE WEEK. By MICHAEL ORME. LIONEL BARRY- MORE'S beautiful portrayal of a country doctor's humble but by no means in glorious career in ONE MAN'S JOURNEY (Coliseum) lifts the pic ture above a mere study in sentiment and self- sacrifice to a vindica tion of the small-town practitioner whose hu manity fills in the gaps in his knowledge. Eli Watt's altruism continually thwarts ...