... . By L. P. HARTLEY. DOUGLAS CAISE was a nervous and introspec tive little boy, the most satisfactory moments of whose waking existence were passed in a dream world. One of his fantasies took the form of murder-massacre, one might say, since the rules of the game allowed, indeed demanded, five victims. These were generally chosen from the visitors to the Bodmin Museum, where his father was ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE EARL OF CHICAGO (Leicester Square) is a picture in a hundred. It gives me a special kind of pleasure to be able to say so, because I know what the film means to its star, Robert Montgomery. Mr. Montgomery, who has played so many light-comedy roles in his career that props just naturally follow him on to the set with a cocktail-shaker, has had two special parts that he ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I HAVE often wondered, and never quite been able to deter mine, how it is that America can graft the silliest stories on to her flag-wagging pictures and get away with it, while the fiction-stories attached to our own Service pictures are apt to stick out like a sore thumb. Take Merle Oberon, for example. saying good-bye to Ralph Richardson in battle-dress in ihe Dion Has ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I MAKE no bones about it. I am a Hitchcock fan. I go to a Hitchcock picture expecting something special, and nearly always I come away satisfied. Only twice in his long career has the chubby director really let me down. It is a great talent for drama Hitchcock has, and, unlike so many European film directors, he seems to have found in Hollywood a new success in implementing ...

... THEATRES OF WARTIME LONDON. By THEODORA BENSON and BETTY ASKWITH, Authors of Foreigners or the World in a Nutshell. No. 2. FUNNY SIDE UP, AT HIS MAJESTY'S THEATRE. I'VE got tickets for 'Funny Side Up,' announced Ber nard, beaming. Laura's face fell. Not that she didn't want to see Funny Side Up, of which on all sides she heard excellent ac counts, but she realised that she never would get ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IF FOR FREE DOM (Gaumont) didn't deal with events that stir us pretty deeply at the moment, I wouldn't put it at the top of this column. It is not, I regret to say, a very good picture. As a documentary mani festo of Britain at war, it is inferior to The Lion Has Wings and The First Days. As a fictional story, presenting Will Fyffe as an enterprising news-reel editor, it ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. TECHNICOLOR'S film version of the Maxwell Andersen play, Eliza beth the Queen, in which Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne ap peared on the American stage, was renamed THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZA BETH AND ESSEX (Warners) for the cinema, I understand, in deference to Errol Flynn, who plays Elizabeth's Essex and didn't quite feel that the original title covered both sides of ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THOSE who are looking for escapist literature (and why should they not?) cannot do better than read The Romantic. In any age this would have been a novel of escape. There never was a society that enjoyed the things that money can buy and re mained so gracefully uncon scious of the money that bought them. I here never was a society so fully liberated from the outward ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. WE assisted this week at a melancholy and historic occa sion-- the swan song, if reports are true, of Shirley Temple, too old at twelve. Personally, I take leave to doubt the reports. Watching her in YOUNG PEOPLE (Odeon), I find myself unable to believe that this is the last we shall see of Holly wood's pocket Duse. Miss Temple, as an orphaned stage child bringing light and ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. Tyrone Power. In DAYTIME WIFE (Odeon) she appears as Mr. Power's young wife, who discovers that her husband is running IT hasn't taken long for Linda Darnell, the sixteen-year-old brunette who made her film début in Hotel for Women, to win the prize award for good little girls in Hollywood-- the privilege of play ing leading lady to around with his secretary (Wendy ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THIS is surely Our Girls' Week in the West End cinema. Vivien, Rosalind, Mary and Maureen-- four such personable and talented young people, in theatres so close together that you could almost use them for a game of rounders. Our Miss Vivien, in fact, achieves the unusual feat of appearing in two adjacent theatres simultaneously-- at the Little Ritz, where she is still, ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MR. MARTIN ARM STRONG is one of our most enjoyable short-story writers, and lovers of that art will always look forward to a new volume from his versatile and talented pen. They will not be disappointed in Simplicity Jones. It maintains his reputation, which was always high, for quality and craftsmanship, and ex tends his range. Several pieueb 111 Llllo UUUJv, LLIC LI Lie ...