... Above and Beyond (Empire) NOTHING will ever persuade me that atom bombs and entertainment mix. Never theless, I am bound to admit that this Hollywood film, with Robert Taylor, takes a strong grip on the imagination. Above and Beyond is about Colonel Paul Tibbets, the man who was chosen to drop the first atom bomb on Hiroshima. A good part of the film is taken up with an account of the curious ...

... Rialto THE fourth Japanese film to be shown in this country, , is the first in colour. It won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Festival last year, and I should say that the award was well deserved. .It is a strange, fascinating, composed and at many times strikingly beautiful film, set in the period which, to the Western mind, seems most attractively Japanese the early Middle Ages. As far as can ...

... . By Eden Phillpotts. (Westaway 10s. 6d.) One of the best of the early books now in a welcome reprint. ...

... . By Manning Coles. Hodder and Stoughton 12s. 6 d.) Cosmopolitan, Secret Service stuff, with bags of death and mystery. For what that tiny strip (of film) contains Muntz died in the North Sea, Alton on the river and Logan in the train the car driver Cutler in Londop, Vladimir and the rat Brachko in Paris. Chadai was burnt to death to-night, and one of these days Yudin will hang by the neck ...

... .with J. C T R E W I N (Adelphi) MUCH have I travell'd in the realms of gold; but until the premiére of John Toré's musical romance, I had never attended a Gold Rush. No calm serene here: the noise at these events in a stage Cape Town and Johannesburg (period 1886) might well have reached South Africa itself. Let me make it clear that this is not a tiring shindy. Not at all. It is, when ...

... THE MERCHANT OF VENICE (Open Air Theatre PRODUCERS who hunt up funny tricks for the Merchant forget that, however bored they themselves may be with the famous comedy, playgoers never tire of it. And why should they tire It remains a great and an exciting play. Robert Atkins knows this, and that is why, invariably, he produces it so well, whether indoors or, as now, on the lawn in Regent's ...

... . By Nevil Shute. (Heinemann 10s. 6 d.) Asut'bHUU, 111-constructea novel, this, which seems to have been cobbled together from two distinct stories. The first is that of a group of Englishwomen in Malaya during the Japanese occupation. They show great courage and good sense in the face of hardships and humiliations, their sufferings are graphically described, and only at the end ol the book ...

... w . By Violet Trefusis. (Michael Joseph 9s. 6 d.) FROM the very first page the embarrassm nt begins as one becomes aware that the author is relentlessly determined to be funny. We ire introduced at once to the large family of an Italian dentist who has obtained a title, quite incredibly, because he attended the Pope. V ith laboured facetiousness the family is descril ed, the attractive ...

... Savoy Everybody must have been seeing double when the curtain fell on this peculiarly com- plicated problem by Roger MacDougall and Ted Allan. Twins are dangerous on the stage unless Anouilh uses them. Although Richard Attenborough can conjure with his pair one is a murderer, or is it the other, or are there twins at all I doubt whether anybody will follow every kink in the story. REVIEWS I ...

... Pincher Martin, by William Gold- ing (Faber and Faber, 15s). Out of the new crop of novelists since the war, Mr. Golding stands as the only writer of genius. One of the qualities of genius is that it demands co-operation; you can lose your place in an Agatha Christie and it doesn't matter, but Mr. Golding's books, The Lord of the Flies, The Inheritors and now Pincher Martin are not just ...

... j Aldwych This, now, is simply dull. Dorothy and j Campbell Christie have written a puzzlc-play j of plodding artifice. It begins stickily and jogs on> jogs on, to a suitable conclusion. My only j trouble is that I never begin to be excited about the murder of the nursery governess an unlikely one in the summer house on a Buckinghamshire estate. I dare say it is a problem; but when there is ...

... Princes A sturdy fellow, after all, this latest . Peter Pratt is one of the gentlest, neatest Robin Oakapplcs in recollection j Donald Adams' Sir Roderick has a masterful j flaunt. Our best D'Oyly Carte Company for some time, and at the Princes until well into the spring. ...