... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES Two Films By James Agate DR. JOHNSON or somebody said that the first business of a writer was to be read. And I shall say that the first object of the film-maker is to make a film which can be seen with pleasure. Whoever you are reading me, I beg you at this point to stop twiddling your curling-tongs, winding your watch, or whatever it is that one does when one is ...

... The Trojan Woman (Lyric, Hammersmith) LOOKING about for a topical play, some thing with an up-to-the-moment theme, the Company of Four have hit upon The Trojan Woman. Nobody can say that they have not found what they were seeking. If you feel like brooding on the ugly, disappointing side of a great military victory, Euripides is still your man. Differences there may oe between 416 B.C. and a ...

... Lady Windermere's Fan (Haymarket) A FASHIONABLE play now some fifty years out of fashion, an audaciously clever, timidly stupid piece of good theatre, Lady Windermere's Fan sets the modern producer a succession of delicate problems. What will his audience make of a husband without comic sense enough to tell his wife that the woman she supposes to be his mistress is really her own mother. ...

... : Reviewed by Trevor Allen HOW that literary wholesaler, Alexandre Dumas, found time to ghost the volu minous travels of a cultivated French woman of a century ago is a matter for wonder; but he did so, evidently from her detailed notes, in The Journal of Madame Giovanni (Hammond, 12s. 6d.), admirably translated from the French edition of 1856 by Mrs. Marguerite E. Wilbur. This vivacious ...

... : Reviewed by T revor o Allen WE shall have to revise our ideas about the coddling of those Girls of Long Ago. I have been reading the autobiography of a lady of Somerset yeoman stock --Elizabeth Ham by Herself, 1783-1820, intro duced and edited by Mr. Eric Gillett (Faber, 10s. 6d.). The cure for eye-inflammation in childhood, she says, was confinement in a dark room for a year. She was ...

... reviewing BOOKS ELIZABETH BOWEL Should They? Now we feel ourselves on the way back to normal-- though still on an early stage of that long road-- the old vexed questions surrounding women's employment are likely, once again, to crop up. Should women work? Can they Do they really want to? Does work make them less attractive? Will family life-- and, through that, the life of the nation-- go to ...

... as a novel in its own right and is, also, par ticularly interesting to read in the same week as the book reviewed above. For, Lady Peck whose most ambitious and profound of, now, several distinguished novels this is touches, imaginatively and intuitively, on the same psychological problems as Mrs. Williams. Work, in the literal sense, does not face Miranda Winter, who marries a competent Civil ...

... Lady From Edinburgh (Playhouse) THIS ill-made little comedy has charm. It is Barrie-esque without the Barrie magic: indeed it might well have been written by one of Barrie's heroines, let us say Maggie Shand, who came near to declaring (you remember): Charm is a sort of bloom on a play. Those that have it don't need to have anything else Lady From Edinburgh has Ihis mysterious, all ...

... Duet For Two Hands (Lyric) GOOD acting glosses over a multitude of faults. Most of the faults of this ghost story of medical science can be accounted for by Miss Mary Hayley Bell's stick-at-nothing determination to write a good acting play. And if you are specially susceptible to good acting Mr. John Mills and his company will waft you breathlessly over what to the less susceptible will appear ...

... MYSELF AT THE PICTURES An Old Problem By James Agate EVERY Hackney judge has been presented with this problem: which of two animals shall he put first, the horse of beautiful quality but little or no action or the common brute who moves magnificently? It's an old teaser. Would you rather your son were at the top of the Fifth form or bottom of the Sixth? Yes, one knows all about Browning with ...

... Young Mrs. Barrington (Winter Garden) THE young Mrs. Barrington is a typical figure of the time. She was married four years ago to a dashing fighter pilot whom she has not seen since, and her married life has been no more than a brief, deliriously happy honeymoon and a long correspondence. On the eve of reunion there seems to be more than a chance that time may have made a fool of her and her ...

... Tomorrow's Eden (Embassy) THERE was a time, according to Mr. Shaw, when an idea had to be at least twenty years old before it was allowed into a theatre. With some assistance from Mr. Shaw, we have changed all that. Nobody will have the hardihood to assert that the authors of this play are shy of topical ideas. How are the fighting men going to feel now that the tension of peril has snapped? ...