... . 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 ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. BALLETOMANES can never be more than welcome guests at Covent Garden, and September 6, 1946, should really be con sidered to have marked the final liberation of this great theatre from the shifts and expedients of the last seven years. For when the house lights went down on that evening, and Maestro Capuano took his place in the orchestra pit, Covent Garden resumed its ...

... . By JOHN RUSSELL. MR. JOHN CLEMENTS' production of Mar riage à la Mode has already disappeared from the playbills. If the indolence and ingratitude of the public had not robbed London, in this way, of its only truthful and intelligent comedy, we could have examined, with a wealth of historical analogy, the classical comic formula which Mr. Benn Levy has revived in his CLUTTERBUCK. In anv ...

... . By C. A. LEJEUNE. THE fabulous Orson Welles, who hasn't directed a picture since The Magnificent Amber sons, although he has appeared in three, sends us a masterly bit of macabre to help us through the silly season. It is called THE STRANGER (Gaumont and Marble Arch Pavilion), and anyone who doesn't revel in this spine-chilling little item must be singularly hard to please. Mr. Welles ...

... . By L. P. HARTLEY. MISS G. B. STERN is a novelist who is not content to show the surface; she looks below and is at pains to discover what it is that makes human beings unable to get on with each other, what are the root causes of the antagonisms that, begin ning as little tiffs, sometimes end in world wars. Her readers will remember in this connection that brilliant and disturbing novel The ...