... THE LITERARY LOUNGER. By L. P. HARTLEY. CITY OF DEPARTURES. By John Brophy. IN his latest novel Mr. John Brophy has had the courage to vindicate priggishness. Most of his characters have streaks of priggishness and at least two of them are snobs. Thorneycroft and Beldon, who have made their way in the world, return to Liverpool, their home town-- the one from London, where the flying bombs ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE KING'S GENERAL is an historical novel-- a blend of fact and fiction, as Miss Daphne du Maurier calls it-- whose subject is the Civil War in Cornwall. Corn wall, my readers will not need reminding, was always staunchly Royalist, and Miss du Maurier's hero, Sir Richard Grenvile, grandson of another, better-known Sir Richard, was the King's General in the West. As she ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. WHEN somebody observes to Cole Porter, in NIGHT AND DAY (Warner Theatre), shaking his head over one of the Master's more esoteric numbers, You should have been born on the East Side, like some of our more popular boys, I felt it was a cry from the heart of an anguished screen-writer. Did I say screen-writer? I should have said writers. It takes no fewer than four of ...

... . HOW much easier for the public if theatre critics, like schoolmasters, could fall back on the impersonal precision of the Greek alpha bet! This week Mr. Freshly scores another with his 'Adolescent Love,' at the Haywire. Such criticism leaves no room for doubt. A single letter and a double negative effectively cook Mr. Freshly's goose, and tell the public what it wants to know without ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. SOME plays exact a certain physical intimacy be tween actors and audience. Ibsen's A DOLL'S HOUSE is certainly one of these-- a play in which the audience ought ideally to get right inside the tight little box of a house and sense, not only each change of temperature in the living-room, but every footfall in the adjoining study and up the frosty path which leads to the ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THERE is a story of P. G. Wodehouse's about the embarrassment caused in a well-bred household when the wife writes an article for a ladies' magazine entitled How I Keep the Love of My Husband- Baby. I couldn't help thinking of it the other day as I sat at the Odeon and watched the embarrassment of some of my well-bred colleagues over the film entitled SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. HAMLET without the Prince is proverbi ally a poor affair; but if one may judge from the Old Vic production at the New Theatre, LEAR with out the King would make an excellent short melodrama of family life. One of the virtues of Mr. Olivier's production is that each of the subsidiary characters, so often foreshortened in the interests of a star actor, is given room and ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IN order to obviate impending quarrels between husband and wife, arguments with girl friend, bets with boy friend, and letters to the film critics, I hasten to record the fact that Catherine McLeod doesn't really play the music you see her play in CONCERTO (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion). Arthur Rubinstein does, and pretty busy he is kept, too. Very early in Concerto ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. TO dub or not to dub, that is the question. What shall a man do who has to translate a film that has been acted in one luggage for audiences that only speak another? Shall he shoot a new sound-track to synchronise with the lip-movements of the players? Or shall he keep the original dialogue and add sub-titles? Two foreign films in London this week give you the chance to ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MANIFOLD are the ways of escaping Reality as it presents itself to the war-weary adult mind, and of these Miss Rosamond Lehmann has chosen one of the most satisfactory; she writes of children and young people, sometimes identifying her angle of vision with theirs, sometimes regarding them from outside, but with tender affection and solicitude, as a mother might. Indeed, ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. IF you have a jaded film appetite from a surfeit of vapid, machine-made nonsense, there are two films to be seen in London this week that can hardly fail to restore your faith in the cinema as an adventurous medium that has still to be fully ex plored. There is IVAN THE TERRIBLE, at the Tatler, and CHILDREN ON TRIAL, at the Academy. Ivan the Terrible is the first film ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE latest instalment of the Hornblower saga gives Mr. Forester a full opportunity to display his peculiar talent for describing battles by sea and land. A special service for the Knights of the Bath in Westminster Abbey is hardly over before Sir Horatio is given a new assignment: to suppress a mutiny. The crew of the Flame, an eighteen-gun brig, have mutinied and are ...