... By JOHN RUSSELL. A GREAT venture is in hand at Sadler's Wells --nothing less than a production sometime next year of Verdi's Otello. The Wells has always kept in mind the ideal that opera should be produced as a dramatic whole, rather than as a series of disconnected outbursts by favourite singers; and in Otello, which is a work of Shakespearean stature, this approach should yield great ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. CLASSICAL music, as I once heard a cinema magnate remark to an archbishop, is box- off. these days, and it was clearly inevitable that the film producers, having done their duty by the lives and works of most of the great composers, should turn their attention to the virtuosi. Nobody need be surprised that Gainsborough should have decided to make a film about the life of ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. GREAT nonsense is being talked about applause at the opera. Applause is a necessary poison for Italian singers, and the hushed attention appropriate to the Three Choirs Festival is quite out of place at a performance of Tosca or Rigoletto. Nor is it the case, as a most dis tinguished critic has suggested, that what may be courtesy in Italy is bad manners here. Good ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. TWO YEARS BEFORE THE MAST (Carlton) is the sort of sea-adventure yarn that Hollywood has always done well. For one thing, it forces the actors out into the open air; which is good for their souls, their health and, gener ally speaking, their ego, since it is extraordinarily difficult to put on airs and graces when drenched to the skin or blown by a 60-m.p.h. gale. For ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THEN AND NOW is an historical novel based on an incident in the life of Niccolo Machiavelli, for centuries so notorious as the author of The Prince, and the admirer of Cæsar Borgia, that his name has almost be come a synonym for the Devil. Mr. Somerset Maugham, how ever, divests him of diabolical attributes and presents him as a typical figure of the Italian Renaissance ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. THE most important news of the month can be summarised, after the fashion of the Continental Daily Mail, in the phrase MISS RUTH DRAPER has arrived at the Apollo Theatre. Miss Draper's season has still another week to run-- another week in which one may enjoy the dry sharpness of her observation, the hidden skill of her performances, and the sudden pot-holes of sentiment ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. STRANGE and inscrutable are the ways of film producers. Consider the case of ADVEN TURE, the new film at the Empire. This is the piece that brings Clark Gable back to the screen, after his years at the wars. Mr. Gable, the producers clearly argued, had been away from the picture public for a perilously long time. In the circum stances, they very wisely cast Mr. Gable with ...

... . By K. JOHN. IN the world of fiction peace has not yet arrived; it rears its head for a moment, and then vanishes beneath the waves. And still the waves come on. That is to say, we are still being inundated with war novels; which is only natural, though it does not allow for the recoil of the human mind. There comes a moment when we want to read about something else when we need what is ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE CAPTIVE HEART (Odeon) seems to me a fine film that has not quite come off. It was clear that something of the kind had to be attempted sooner or later, by any industry that reckons to take its dramatic materials from the stuff of life. It deals with the problem of our prisoners of war. Beginning with the dreary march back to Germany of British soldiers captured at ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MR. GEORGE MILLAR has chosen an odd title for his escape story. Why pigeon, one may ask oneself, and why horned? The answer to the first question is to be found in the brief fable that serves as a foreword to the book; the author, the escaped prisoner of war, is the pigeon, the homing pigeon. Why horned the reader will dis cover at the end, if he does not guess before. ...

... . By C. A LEJEUNE. IN the not impossible event that you feel the motion pictures could do with a change of style, personnel and scene, I strongly recom mend a new Swedish film at the Academy, called FRENZY. This is a beautifully-managed little work about an adolescent schoolboy who gets in volved, out of a chivalrous sort of pity, with a poor little trollop from a tobacconist's shop. The ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. THE moonlight of Mr. Joyce Cary's title is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, to music-lovers of Victorian times pre-eminently the symbol of romance. Much of his novel takes place, retro spectively, in those times when to play the Moonlight Sonata was the ambition of so many accomplished young ladies. Mr. Cary's imagina tion is steeped in symbolism perhaps he wants us to ...