... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. DO plays make films? It sounds rather like Alice in Won derland's celebrated Do cats eat bats?; but it is pertinent, neverthe less, as pertinent as Lewis Carroll is, too, when you come to study him. The question turns up again this week, over the case of MA J OR BARBARA, at the Odeon. I must confess that Major Barbara confirms my earlier doubts over How He Lied to Her ...

... By Herbert Farjeon Women Aren't Angels Strand THIS farce by Vernon Sylvaine, in which characters, still further to brighten the dialogue, answer to such surnames as Butch, Bandle and Popday; in which husbands hunt, or are hunted by their wives, in pairs; in which pretty girls in dishabille are bundled behind curtains at short notice to avoid-- or can it be to arouse?-- suspicion; and in which ...

... Wednesday After The War (New) By Herbert Farjeon ONE gathers from the theme or title song of this outstandingly unexhilarating musical production that by the Wed nesday After the War everything in the garden of Europe will be absolutely wonderful, and that we shall all immediately be allowed as much petrol as we can use and as many onions as we can digest, while young ladies will respond with ...

... Reviewed by Noel Thompson THERE have been stories in the newspapers recently, Your Canaries Can Still Sing and No Need to Kill Your Pets, dealing with the shortage of birdseed and enumerating substitutes for adequate feeding. When a few days later I picked up Bechhofer Roberts's book The Bird seed Pool (Robert Hale, 7s. 6d.) I looked at the title with amazement and then dived into it. ...

... By Herbert Farjeon No Time for Comedy (Haymarket) SMART is the word for this play, which is as smart as they make them. As smart as Noel Coward, though it is by S. N. Behrman. As smart as Schiaparelli, though Diana Wynyard's costumes were de signed and executed by Paquin and Victor Stiebel. As smart, twice, thrice as smart, as the Haymarket Theatre, where it is being played. And the ...

... REMINISCENCES of theGREAT A mbassador Dodd's Diary Viscount Mersey's Memoirs John Buchan's Last JJovd -By Vernon Fane FROM 1933 to 1938 the United States Ambassador to Germany was Mr. William Dodd, formerly Professor of History in the University of Chicago, and the holder of a Doctor's degree from the University of Leipzig. Presi dent Roosevelt appointed him because he wanted for the post a ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. MR. FRED ASTAIRE, you will remember, had a number in Care free in which he advocated Changing Partners. It was a charming number, one of his neatest and most tuneful, and a good many people, I fancy, will wish that it had stayed-- just a number. Screen partnerships are odd things. When they happen right, they are something more than the sum of two good performances. An x ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. I CAN'T say I ever thought the day would come when we should see Franchot Tone, that earnest member of Hollywood's intel lectual set, in the Stetson and buck skins of a Western hero, but that's how he appears in TRAIL OF THE VIGILANTES (Odeon). I still don't think that Mr. Tone is quite the cowboy type, but I am so glad to see him back on the screen alter months of ...

... , By L. P. HARTLEY. THE weakness of much anti-totalitarian propa ganda is that it repre sents the movement as based on a creed which no one in his senses could subscribe to, or as a form of madness which no one is likely to catch. We are shown the horrors it brings with it, the injustice, cruelty, perfidy, bloodshed, the lower ing or liquidation of moral standards but we are not told how it is ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE most unusual film of this or many weeks past is VICTORY (Plaza), from the Joseph Conrad novel of ideals and adven ture in the sticky South Seas. It is pos sibly a little more unusual than the producers reckoned for, since they have done their best to make recognisable movie material of it the sort of film for which South of This, and East of That, and West of the ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE present century has produced few novelists capable of being com pared with the masters of the last; and the chief cause of this is, not that our novelists are necessarily inferior, but that their subject-matter lacks the stability essential for a work of fiction. The structure of society may not have changed' as much as some people think, but it has changed and is still ...

... (tA Hut By James Agate Good Material and Bad THE incommunicable mystery of the sea. I forget who said this. Perhaps nobody. Possibly it is merely the crystallisation of what all seafarers, and landfarers too, have felt about the world's changeless, ever-changing high-roads. Whatever its origin the phrase sums up the informing spirit of that great writer, Joseph Conrad, which is at once ...