... THE LITTLE HUT (Lyric) FROM galleon to skiff. I think that the first English title for The Little Hut was better. Nancy Mitford's version of a comedy by Andr6 Roussin was to have been called Island Fling and it is nothing but a fling, a romp in which the company, abetted by producer and designer, kicks up its heels for a couple of hours and hopes that we shall enjoy the spectacle. The joke is ...

... By CYRIL BUTCHER ANENT our remarks on the subject of documentary programmes in the last issue, when we said that they should be written with as much dramatic impact as a play, it is an interesting coincidence that two recent television plays should in effect have been documentaries. The first, Beverley Nichols' Shadow of the Vine, was quite the most shattering thing we have seen for a long, ...

... Never Let Me Go (Empire) THERE is a serious and poignant picture to be made on the theme of the Russian war-wives refused a permit to accompany their husbands outside the Iron Curtain. Never Let Me Go is not that picture. It deals, to be sure, with the plight of such a girl, but neither the story nor the treatment-- flippant, novelettish, glib and a bit untimely-- seems exactly in accord with ...

... THE MARTINS' NEST Westminster AFTER swans on the duck-pond, we have the Martins at East Putney. Their nest is a semi basement, but Dad is a temporary Civil Servant and Mum has the most genteel hopes for her three children. They are going to be among the Putney glories. Alas, they are not simply because Mum, relentlessly aspiring snob, pushes them too hard and woe treads upon woe. Joan Morgan ...

... J* IN the case of Captain Horatio Hornblower, R.N., to say that the film doesn't live up to expectations is a tribute. There was such a hullabaloo raised in certain quarters of this country when it was announced that an American actor, Gregory Peck, was to play C. S. Forester's beloved British sea-dog, and an American actress, Virginia Mayo, had been cast as the wild rose of an English ...

... AT THE CINEMA with C. A. LEJEUNE The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan (Plaza) IT is very right and proper that visitors to London in Coronation summer should have the chance of seeing a film about one of England's traditional institutions-- Gilbert and Sullivan opera. True, they may be a little mystified by what they see, wondering how our grandfathers and grandmothers could have been so late ...

... Up from Y onkers and Blackpool with JL_C. TREWIN I WAS not very happy about The Match maker in Edinburgh. After all, it was only the third time I had seen it. The company had not settled down; moreover, someone behind me was trying, with impassioned earnestness, to find a logical explanation for Thornton Wilder at his wildest. Aye, she would begin suddenly, but and you have no idea into what ...

... . By C. E. Vulllamy. Michael Joseph 10s. 6 d.) A lively thriller peppered with satire. It j is based on a nightmarish piece of fantasy but brings if into focus and keeps it there. ...

... . By Pamela Barrington. (barker 9s. bd.) Miss Barrington sticks to precedents that are wearing a little thin. Murder, jewels, polioe, cockney dialect, and so on. By binding or printing error there were sixteen blank pages in my copy, but it did not very much matter. ...

... . By Stanley Jackson. (Odhams 15s.) Mr. Jackson is an adept in that most difficult undertaking, the biography of living people. He follows his excellent i study of Mr. Justice Humphreys with this s study of a vital and in many ways para- j doxical personality. He writes racily, with an easy mastery of facts and a liking for a good story. ...

... Macbeth (Mermaid) I should not have been at all surprised if someone had appeared in Inverness during the Murder scene and observed I zeem you 'm gwain purty fast. This Mermaid revival, which whisks along at Elizabethan speed (credit to Joan Swinstead) is spoken in an accent similar (we are told) to that commonly em ployed by educated Londoners at the beginning of the seventeenth century. ...

... Casque d'Or (Golden Mane) {Academy) I am told by a man who should know, ince his business is to show and distribute foreign films in England, that what modern audi.-nces hope for in French pictures is plenty of sex and violence. Their hopes_will not be dis: ppo-nted by Casque d'Or Golden Marie based on the career of a real-life charmer, -/ho was supposed to bring bad luck to all her lovers. ...