... By Horace Horsnell Acacia Avenue (Vaudeville) SOMEDAY the happy breeds of Balham, Tooting, and the lands beyond the five- mile radius will rise in revolt, not against their conditions, but against flippant exposure on the stage. The tocsin will be sounded on Shooters Hill, the standard raised on Clapham Common, Wandsworth will embody its militia, Blackheath raise levies, and storm troops ...

... : fi ftr^ Reviewed by fifl Trevor^llen SUPPOSE you know, intimately, just one lovable young man who has been sacrificed in this war. Isn't his loss, while the instigators of that war go on living, a challenge to all your fundamental beliefs in God and the justice of God, and your spiritual faiths in the future? Mr. Rom Landau thinks so. His Letter to Andrew (Faber, 8s. 6d.) is addressed to a ...

... Walter de la Mare's Anthology of Love The Life of A. A. Milne Life on a Corvette Secret Service in Lforth Africa The Lady of the Manor The Beauties of the Home Counties --By Vernon Fane WHEN I picked up Mr. Walter de la Mare's LOVE (Faber, 25s.), I remem bered something Q once said: British poetry contains a very great deal of information about love, some of it really illuminating; but the ...

... By Horace Horsnell j Something in the Air (Palace) IT is great fun having Miss Cecily Court neidge back again. She is a thoroughly English comedienne, whose versatility, vitality and intimate good humour are unriv alled. And as long as she is in command of its numbers, this new musical comedy is all that its devisers intend, or her admirers could wish. Yet even she is mortal and when, like the ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IF you go to Warners' or the Regal this week, you will see what is, without any doubt, an exceptionally interesting picture. It is called KING'S ROW. I can't pro mise you '11 like it. I don't like it. But I can promise, and hereby do, that it will be talked about. Wherever the intelligentsia get together, and the conversation comes round, as it inevitably does, to films, ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. CYNICISM is an attitude of mind that is not much respected, I be lieve, by serious thinkers, but it has its value, both practical and theoretical. A cynic is seldom a fanatic, and though he may do a certain amount of harm, it is likely to be on a small scale, compared with that done by fanatics and enthusiasts. Ready and in deed anxious to believe the worst of human nature, ...

... ONE YEAR OF WAR --October 1942 to October 1943 The Marvellous Improvement within the Space of Twelve Months of the Allied Position on Land, by Sea, and in the Air. Reviewed by CHARLES GRAVES IT is inevitable that the shortening days and lengthening black-out of the fifth winter of the World War should create a feeling of stateness at home, however encouraging the reports from the various ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE MY SISTER EILEEN (Savoy).-- The films long ago put an end to the American flavour in farce being a new one. Yet My Sister Eileen, which is as American as anything yet seen on the stage, is wholly a novelty and at the same time one of the most hilariously amusing farces which have ever cheered up London. It is good to get away from unfaithful husbands, French vamps ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE new Robert Donat film, originally pro duced as Sabotage Agent, has turned up in the cinemas (the Empire, to be explicit) under the god-awful title, THE ADVENTURES OF TARTU. This seems to me the silliest title-change since Bill and Min became Min and Bill (or was it Mm and Bill ilia! hwamp Rill and Min The nicetv eludes me). Hilaire Belloc once wrote an admirable ...

... LIVELY READING IN FACT AND FICTION -By Vernon Fane The Biography of a Flying Pioneer Eighteenth-Century American Frontier Battles A Ffovel of Occupied France, and a Thriller of the Week BILLY MITCHELL is known as the stormy petrel of American aviation, and his life is still regarded by many as an example of a man fighting against inertia and prejudice in high places, and against a re luctance ...

... By Horace Horsnell Landslide f Westminster) THIS drama of adolescent adventure in the Alps comes to us from the French, but seems somehow to have lost its way. It promises to be a problem-raiser, but thinks, I won't say better, but less seriously, of it. In older days it might have been a morality thriller, propounding, through the plight of its characters and their behaviour under stress, ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Half a Masterpiece By James Agate EXPRESSIONISM in the theatre is, I am glad to say, dying. The expressionist producer gloried in posing his charac ters on precarious step-ladders, straddled athwart beams and squatting on the apices of triangles-- so long as these characters were thus perched and poised the matter of their jabbering was immaterial I have long thought ...