... OUR BOOKSHELF OUR REVIEWER'S CHOICE Rupert Croft-Cooke ATTIC AND AREA. By F ranees ca Marion. (Hamish Hamilton 10s. 6 d.) TWO LOVELY BEASTS. By Liam O'Flaherty. Gollancz 9s. 6 d.) THE VICTIM. By Saul Bellow. (Lehmann 9s. 6 d.) PAY-OFF IN CALCUTTA. By Richard Collier. (Pilot Press 8s. 6 d.) ATTIC AND AREA. Now and again among the highly-coloured ranks of new novels, the persistent reviewer ...

... written for a lady (Garrick) is another odd play by Leo Marks, who wrote The Girl Who Couldn't Quite. Odd because the author cannot at present harness his undeniable gift for dialogue to a plausible plot. Clifford Molbson and Margaretta Scott do their best to aid him here. the pilgrim's progress (Covent Garden). Hugh Ross Williamson's effort to get Bunyan's great allegory upon the stage ...

... WITH a direct simplicity of purpose not as a rule the characteristic of this form of literature, the synopsis of The Naked City tells us exactly what we need to know about the film in its opening paragraph. Against the authentic background, it says, of more than a hundred famous New York City landmarks, Homicide Bureau detectives Dan Muldoon (Barry Fitzgerald) and James Halloran (Don ...

... OUR BOOKSHELF OUR REVIEWER'S CHOICE Rupert Croft-Cooke CATALINA.-- This strange, almost incredible, but edifying narrative, as the author himself calls it in the last paragraph of his book, follows the life of a seventeenth-century Spanish girl from the moment in which she witnesses a miracle on the steps of the Carmelite Convent's church in Castel Rodriguez to the time when she is ...

... THIS has been a Christmas of Many Happy Returns. I shall think of it as the year of the Uncle and Aunt. The Uncle is at the Princes, where Babes in the Wood, the more roystering of Central London's panto mimes, is crackling like a bonfire. There is everything here except a harlequinade, but other joys dim before the Wicked Uncle of Eddie Gray, a Baron with a trick of juggling away the hours ...

... By C. A. Lejeune MONSIEUR ALIBI.-- A deft, suave, deceptively wide-eyed little comedy about a master swindler who hires a double to provide him with an alibi, and then finds that the double, although a bumpkin, is more successful as a lover than he is. Or is he? The film ends on an intriguing question mark, and is superbly carried by Louis Jouvet in five distinct characterisations. ■k* la ...

... . By John Newton Chance. (iviacQonaiu as. o a.) Villainy in a village. Fast-moving and mystifying stuff efficiently written. ...

... AMBASSADOR EXTRAORDINARY (Aldwych). A messenger from Mars in Downing Street. This is not William Douglas Home's best play, but it is at least satirical comedy with a certain sting, and Raymond Lovell, Jane Baxter and Jacques Berthier act it well. The only poor first-night performance was the gallery's a dreary exhibition of bad manners. wonders never cease (Comedy). But this critic's interest ...

... ^Aetc/i -$ocd BEVERLEY BAXTER. AS a matter of meteorological interest, I feel compelled to report that here in North America there is a considerable amount of snow at this time of the year. I am writing these notes in one of those Canadian homes in Toronto where cooking is done by a process of sleight-of- hand in the kitchen and the central heating seems to come from nowhere and is very cosy. ...

... By C. A. Lejeune THE UNFAITHFUL.-- Our story, announces a disembodied voice on the sound-track, takes place in Southern California. The problem with which it deals belongs not to any one city, town or country, but is of our times. The film never quite justifies this portentous statement, but is a well-told and handsome melodrama about a soldier who comes back from the Far East to find ...

... . . By James Lansdale Hodson. (Gollancz 12s. 6d.) (Gollancz 12s. 6d.) Another instalment of this wide-awake ob server's day-to-day journal. Of more interest to posterity than to us, I feel. ...

... . By Nora Kent. pviacaonaia as. oa.j A vigorous story of two women friends, set in Westmorland and Hastings. This writer- knows her background and is determined that the reader shall know her characters. ...