... . 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 ...

... 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. SONS AND FATHERS, is a novel dealing with the last days of Tsarism and the beginnings of the Bolshevik Revolution. Mr. Maurice Hindus has chosen a title which deliberately chal lenges comparison with Turgenev's masterpiece. His story does not sustain the compari son, and it seems to me that the spirit of the men who made the Revolution is better ex pressed by Bazarov, in ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MOST Scandinavian novels are problem novels, for the Scandinavians of to-day, though not perhaps more religious than ourselves, seem to have tenderer con sciences; consciences not only tender, but slightly morbid, infected with the queasiness of Hamlet's moral outlook. Such novels, of course, still abound in English fiction, but not only have they shifted their ground, ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. UNLESS you feel, as some people do, that the whole busi ness of Rasputin and the cakes is a bit old-fashioned now, that enough is enough, I think you will enjoy ''LA TRAGÉDIE IM- PÉRIALE, at the Embassy, in Totten ham Court Road. But perhaps ''enjoy'' is hardly the word to use. Relish, admire, be moved by, let us say. This is the seventh screen version of the Rasputin ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. A PESSIMIST arguing that we live in an age of deterioration might well bring forward, in support of his thesis, the fate that has overtaken sport of nearly every description. Generally the root of the trouble is commercial isation; the spirit of gain has overpowered and absorbed the spirit of the game. In the case of mountaineering, the symp toms and perhaps the cause of ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. SEEING that Mr. Max Relton's travels took place in French Indo-China, I almost automatically scanned the contents (a pity there is no index) for the magic word Angkor. I did not find it; but two-thirds of the way through the book I discovered that Mr. Relton had antici pated my enquiry. So far, therefore [he savsl as any reader is prepared to wade through this book solely ...