... . 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 ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MANY people have their favourite century, with which they claim a spiritual kinship. Perhaps few would wish to have lived in the Dark Ages, though their friends can see how well it would have suited them. To be told, in an after dinner game, that you belonged to the Middle Ages, might be a compliment or not, according to the speaker's tdne of voice. If we suppose the modern ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. FOR those who cannot place the quotation-- I could not-- let me say that. Mr. Roland Pertwee's title, The Camelion's Dish, comes from a passage in Hamlet, and refers to the chameleon's supposed habit of living on air. You eat the air, promise- crammed you cannot feed capons so The other and better-known attribute of the chameleon, its adaptability, Mr. Pertwee s hero ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. IN the piping times of peace, ruthlessness used to seem rather a good joke. Man's inhumanity to man, or at any rate the idea of it, made countless thousands laugh. Who has not chuckled over Captain Harry Graham's Ruthless Rhymes for Heart less Homes, or Mr. Belloc's Cautionary Tales, or Max Adeler's unhappily- worded earlier essay in epitaphs in the same vein-- We have ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. WHAT'S in a name? asked Shakespeare, who did not have to do any advertising, and could get away with The Famous His tory of the Life of King Henry VIII., without stopping to think what it would look like on a forty-eight sheet. There 's plenty in a name, as the film business has been aware ever since those pioneer gems of alliteration, The Exploits of Elaine and The ...

... EVERYONE'S DOING IT- LATEST FORM OF WAR SERVICE. Many people are giving their blood to be stored until required for life-saving trans fusions for air-raid victims or active service casualties. There's nothing terrifying about this sacrifice, as our photograph of the TRANSFUSION CENTRE at Cranborne, seat of Lord and Lady Cranborne, shoivs, A Transfusion Unit has come in its lorry to the ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MEMORY HOLD-THE- DOOR is the auto biography of a singu larly successful man. The fact that the author started life as John Buchan, one of the several children of a poor Scottish minister, and ended it as Lord Tvveedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada, proves this, but it does not tell, or even suggest, the whole story. Success and fulfilment often go hand in hand, but not ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I HAVE a very warm sympathy for the people who declare that they don't want to see any more war films or propaganda films just now; that they go to the cinema for escape. There is no need to ask, escape from what But I think that not enough attention has been paid, perhaps, to the complementary question, escape to what In these days we don't find escape in an entertainment ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. PEOPLE differ very much in the pleasure they get from dwelling on the past, and this difference does not altogether depend on whether the past-- their past or the past in general-- has been pleasant to dwell on. It depends chiefly, perhaps, on a habit of mind. Some conjure up the past because it was a happy time others, for the same reason, try to forget it it reminds them ...