... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE PANAMA HATTIE.-- Rarely have I heard such witless dialogue as there is in this Cole Porter musical at the Piccadilly; every one was talking through his, or her, Panama hattie, and most of them seemed to need a microphone (and in one case a megaphone as well) in order to enable them to do it. Cole Porter's tunes are well below his usual level; indeed, the only music ...

... THE BEST BOOKS OF THE WEEK -Bv Vernon Fane M lie. Curie as a War Correspondent Biographical Essays of Two Saints The Story of a Bomber Pilot The Fate of the Islanders of Bonin MLLE. EVE CURIE, besides being the biographer of her great mother, is a war corre spondent of no mean ability. Her JOURNEY AMONG WAR RIORS (Heinemann. 15s.) is a brilliantly written journal of her experiences during the ...

... --By Vernon Fane Victorian Influence in the West Indies An Englishman from Tokyo A Character Study of Raleigh A Fine Record of the Royal A[avy The Batsford Centenary CASHEL, in Mr. James Hope Hennessy's WEST INDIAN SUMMER (Batsford. 12s. 6d.), was aide-de-camp to the Governor of Trinidad in 1939. From the boredoms of official life he turned to a library of books written by eminent visi tors to ...

... By Horace Horsnell Arc tie Triomphe (Plicenix) MR. IVOR NOVELLO'S latest play is un deniably canonical. No one could mis take it for a work by Noel Coward, Wagner, or Gilbert and Sullivan. Its amiable features-- musical, sentimental and dramatic-- are as clearly his own as those of Hamlet, say, are Shakespearean, or the unwinking regard of the waxen celebrities of the Marylebone Road is ...

... TU By Horace Horsnell She Follows Me About (Garrick) MR. BEN TRAVERS calls his new play a comedy, and he may be right. Con noisseurs of farce, however, whom he has generously catered for in the past, need not feel snubbed on that account. After all, what's in a name, when the author of Rookery Nook. Thark, and other redoubtable riots does the christening? What was there is here. Common sense ...

... By Horace Horsnell The Dark River (Whitehall) ABSENCE, they say, makes the heart grow fonder, and exile deepens the longing for home. Subtler, more deeply hidden longings, they tell us, are a common malady. These may range from unconscious desire to return to carefree childhood, to regret for more adult havens of lost happiness and content. Appreciating the dramatic possibilities ol such a ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. DANCE of the Years is the life (and death) story of J ames Galantry, son of an East Anglian squire. Old Galantry had married again, late in life; his second wife was a gypsy, and this accident of parentage gave James a sense of apartness, not only from his step-relations, but from the whole world. l his cir cumstance, together with the historical setting of Miss Mar gery ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. YOU will have noticed an in creasing ten dency of late to make films about groups of people-- marines, A.T.S. girls, munition workers, nurses of Bataan. In the old days, it used to be considered sufficient for one beautiful girl to have one love-story in each film. Nowadays we study the emotional problems of half-a-dozen in a batch. Whether it is just reaction, or the ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor -yd lien LAST year Lord Beaverbrook presided at a dinner to his former Parliamentary Secretary, Colonel Llewellin, who was then Minister of Aircraft Production. All the M.A.P. heads were there. Beaverbrook was handed a typed programme of speeches. What, he cried. Another programme from the Air Ministry? Nonsense, M.A.P. never lives up to its programmes, let's change ...

... By Horace Horsnell Panama Hattie (Piccadilly) LIKE ancient Gaul, this modern American hullabaloo is divided into three parts: music, spectacle, and comedy; and in that respect it is traditional. The placing of these three elements, however, is as follows: comedy (highly knockabout) first, Mr. Cole Porter's music second, spectacle a good wartime third. Such plot as there is gets in a word or ...

... Reviewed by PHILIP PAGE THE LOVE RACKET.-- I have never been so sure of anything in the theatre as that this musical comedy at the Victoria Palace will last for months and months, probably for years and years, and possibly until the war is over or even until after the next one has begun. It has been produced with competent slickness by Mr. William Mollison, the music is gay and catchy, there ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. BETTE DAVIS'S directors are said to have said that for Bette to get going at her best she needs to play an intelligent female who is either wrong on wronged, against a background of earthquake, upper-class murder, or historical crisis. Personally, I like my Bette wrong and hopping mad a cross between Jezebel, Mildred of Human Bondage and Regina of The Little Foxes which may ...