... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES A French Cavalcade By James Agate C. E. MONTAGUE laid it down that good work is never lost, while Arnold Bennett maintained that if the world held only one copy of a first-class book and that book were dropped in the Sahara Desert some traveller would discover it. Meaning, I have always thought, that if the traveller were an Englishman he would turn up his nose at the ...

... The Sadler's Wells Ballet (New) By Horace Horsnell AGE has not yet withered, nor custom staled, the Sadler's Wells Ballet. It has the freshness without the gaucheries of youth. Its repertory seems infinite in variety and is first-rate in quality. Founded and brilliantly directed by Ninette de Valois, it has become one of the brightest ornaments of our stage. The leading dancers, Robert ...

... ■^4 By Sabretache Pour F.ncnuraser let Autres GERMANY'S Verführer has told the Officers' Corps that it is the only body which can win the Third World War, and by way of emphasising the truth of this statement, he has hanged them in rows. The German General Staff may be a most erudite collection of warriors, but it has signally failed to prove the fact in this war. Anything will seem to gallop ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Long, Dull and Worthy By James Agate Shipbuilders (New Gallery) is a very long, very dull, very worthy, very dull, and very long film about shipbuilding on the Clyde. At the press show critics were presented with an elaborate four-leaved programme nearly a foot square, in which a tiny rivulet of text meandered through a meadow of navy-blue margin. This colossal programme ...

... Keep Going (Palace) By Horace Horsnell WHEN Pallas Athene sprang full-armed from the brain of Zeus, she gave an example of monogenesis which revues, with rare exceptions, have been chary of following. The purveyors of such entertain ment would seem to favour the safety in numbers watchword, rather than the too many cooks alternative At any rate, the average modern revue is apt to be a ...

... The Circle (Hay market) By Horace Horsnell FIRST-RATE repertory is now the rage, and Mr. Gielgud's season at the Haymarket gives the theatre yet another brilliant fillip. It opened auspiciously with The Circle, popularly regarded as Somerset Maugham's best comedy; and only those diehard dis- senters, who deny virtue to most revivals Missingword their old favourites, should carp at this one. ...

... Hamlet at the New Theatre By Horace Horsnell THE news that Robert Helpmann, who had already danced Hamlet, intended also to act him, fluttered the dovecots considerably. Would he? Could he? True he had already acted one Shakespearian role (Oberon at the Old Vic), and his spoken excerpt from Comos, in the delightful ballet he had recently based on Milton's young master-piece, vindicated his ...

... Uncle Harry (Garrick) By Horace Horsnell DEATH is still busy in the theatre, bumping off, or more deftly removing, characters from plays with a lethal prodigality reminiscent of the Jacobean shambles. After the Shakespearean, Arsenic and Old Lace, and Ten Little Niggers holocausts, here is another less wholesale essay in murder as a dramatic art to swell the season's casualties. It is an ...

... MYSELF AT TOE PICTURES Nothing Like It By James Agate I ATTENDED The Bridge of San Luis Rey (London Pavilion) without having read Thornton Wilder's book, hailed as a masterpiece when it came out. Looking to my old friend Synopsis, I learned that this is the story of a priest, one Brother Juniper, who was concerned to discover why, when sometime in 1714, the finest bridge in Peru broke, five ...

... AS I write this, the evening newspaper are carrying staring headlines of the in vasion of Europe, and in front of me lies an orange-jacketed book proclaiming with equal emphasis that this is D-DAY (Hamish Hamilton. ios. 6d.). In point of fact, the D-Day (military term for the day set in advance for the opening of an onerationl to which Mr. John Gunther refers was the crucial date of the ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MISS STELLA GIBBONS' new novel should rather be called The Bachelors, for Kenneth Fielding is only one of three marked down for eventual marriage. Hen-pecked by his. sister Constance, who runs and rules his house, diffident from the effect of a jilting long years ago, he has reached the age of forty-eight when Vartouhi, a refugee from a small imaginary Balkan country, ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IT isn't every week that you can go to a motion- picture gallery, and see an exhibition of some of the best work of Jean Gabin, Louis Jouvet, Suzy Prim, Jean Renoir, Maxim Gorki, John Steinbeck, Burgess Meredith and Walt Disney, but that is the pleasure I can promise you this week at the Academy Cinema, where they are showing the French UNDERWORLD and the American FOR ...