... THE CINEMA REVIEWS By C. A. Lejeune THE CURE FOR LOVE. I have been deeply touched, and just a fraction amused, by the friendly efforts of metropolitan and south-country colleagues to protect us northerners against The Cure for Love, Robert Donat's screen version of Walter Greenwood's Lancashire comedy. When I came out of the Press-show, full of a rich and secret enjoyment, my London ...

... THE THEATRE J. C. Trewin CASTLE IN THE AIR. It is also a castle in Scotland-- name of Locharne-- and, so we gather, a grim sight externally, in the prickliest Scottish Baronial. Inside, thanks to the setting by Michael Weight, it could hardly be more agreeable, and we have to struggle to imagine the horrors of the Macduff Room-- somewhere in a distant wing-- where Mr. Phillips, of the ...

... . By Winston Clewes. Michael Joseph 9s. 6 d.) FRANKLY, I don't quite see the point. I cannot understand why a novelist as vigorous and persuasive as Mr. Clewes should have chosen to tell the story of such a dull and insignificant eroun of neonle as tin four central characters of this book. Dirk Warren is given a terrific build-up as a ruth less time-server, both as a boy and a vounj man, but ...

... Eli&alfoih //oil' THE public, states Sir Patrick Hastings, K.C., in the introductory chapter of his Cases in Court (Heinemann, 15s.) is begin ning to lose interest in the Law. Important as it is that justice should be done, and still more that justice should appear plainly to be done, the most important element of all is that the Law should appear to everyone as their one protector against ...

... Ctfr Fallen Alibis jAinltiissiiiloi's) AailluiiiT Fookmaii IT was quite in the spirit of the Twenties that Mr. Coward, moved to anglicize the gaily amoral wives of French comedy, should set the young ladies bibbing champagne like a couple of cavalry subalterns and at the same time deny them any real gaiety of heart. A good Press was thus assured. The situa tion was said to be amusing, the ...

... THERE has been a fuss about the possible televising of an SOS. message. It was sure to come. All the regular headaches of sound radio will sooner or later transfer them selves to the heads available at the Alexandra Palace. Week's Good Causes, Fat Stock Prices, the education of the young and of the Forces, religious services and regional news-- all these admirable functions of a great public ...

... . By Aubrey Menen. Chatto and Windus 9s. 6 d.) ALL too often the second novel of a promising writer is a sore disappointment to those who have liked his first. This is no exception. Mr. Menen will be remembered for his picturesque and gay The Prevalence of Witches. In the present book he seems to be trying too hard to exploit his own originality one might almost say, without forgetting the ...

... . By H. Oloff de Wet. Blackwood 9s. id.) THIS is one of the most strange and jrrible books which have yet been thrown up from the ugly crater of wartime imprisonment in Germany. Mr. de Wet was, in the best sense of the word, an adventurer, who fell into the hands of the Gestapo. The Vo/hischer Beobachter, reporting his trial as a spy for France, described him as follows comes from English ...

... THERE is an epic sweep to Mr. A. Den Doolaard's novel, suitable to its epic subject. ROLL BACK THE SEA (Heinemann. 15s.) is the story of the fifteen months during which Walcheren was reclaimed from the sea. The great dykes which protected the island front the sea had been breached in 1944 by Allied planes so that the German strongpoints on it should be flooded, and the way left more open for ...

... Etizubvih I/oiitm THE domestic, or family, novel has from the first been a British forte. Its appropriateness to the Victorian age was obvious: these days, it is wonderful how it stays the course-- in spite of changing conditions, standards and ideas. Where a very great number of readers are con cerned, nothing, so far, has challenged, for first interest, the discreetly muffled dramas of the ...

... dF tfe- ■NtruJLZ Anthony Cookmnn ltemarkablc Mr. Christopher Fry THE theatrical season just opening may fairly be said to flaunt a new bright thread of personality. Everybody is talking of Mr. Christopher Fry. A year ago Mr. rrys name to the general playgoer was no more than that of an exuberant young poet who wrote for dramatic festivals and for little theatres. His plays were liked by actors ...

... SUAVE is the word for Mr. L. P. Hartley's style, if not for his subject-matter. THE BOAT (Putnam. 12s. 6d.) is an exceptional novel, a tragi-comedy of mariners, and most of them very good manners indeed. Certainly the manners of Timothy Casson, the elderly essayist whose saga this is, are unexceptionable, even though, for such a quiet man, he has a curiously dis ruptive effect on the remote ...