... CINEMA RECENT PRODUCTIONS STAGE STRUCK (on release) is a new version of Morning Glory, the film that won stardom and an Oscar for Katharine Hepburn twenty- five years ago. Today it seems likely to do the same for nineteen-year-old Susan Strasberg, the girl who played Anne Frank in New York and Kim Novak's kid sister in Hollywood's Picnic. It tells the old story of little Miss Nobody from the ...

... THEATRE RECENT PRODUCTIONS THE MOSCOW ART THEATRE (Sadler's Wells) offers one of the most extraordinary experiences within the average playgoer's memory. I don't understand Russian, but I have long known the wistful magic of Chekhov; and' those two great plays, The Cherry Orchard and The Three Sisters, and a slightly lesser one, Uncle Vanya, have never been more magical than they are at the ...

... THE DAME'S THE SAME Although she is one of pantomime's essentials, the dear soul can be a burden by J. C. TREWIN I DON'T like Dames. Please do not misunderstand me. I am not talking about our prized Dame Edith, Dame Sybil, Dame Peggy-- though naturally one must snatch every chance to do so-- but about the figures figures that bob up in the holiday theatre They are pantomime's Women of the Hour ...

... BOOKS REVIEWED BY ANGELA MILNE THERE is no doubt that The Voice at the Back Door, by Elizabeth Spencer (Gollancz 15s), about as American as a novel can get. But this doesn't in the least mean that we British won't or can't enjoy the book. In fact, as I worked through the close texture of this subtly-treated tragedy of Southern small-town politics, it was often in my mind how oddly willing, not ...

... FILMS ARE FINISHED-- UNLESS Meanwhile the film industry turns to the Far East for inspiration unless the cinema industry stops pitying itself, pulls itself together and works with, instead of against, progress by C. A. THE New Year has not opened auspiciously for the film industry; particularly the British film industry. Hard after the announce ment that attendances at cinemas in this country ...

... CINEMA Recent Productions THE BARBARIAN AND THE GEISHA (Release: Nov. 10) describes the difficulties encountered by one Townsend Harris, in the 1880's, in getting himself accepted as the first US consul-general to Japan. With John Wayne as the consul; Eiko Ando as the geisha who is put into his house to spy but learns to love him. John Huston directs. Shot entirely in Japan, the film is highly ...

... Mainly about People by ANGELA MILNE THE real heroines of literature, it seems to me, are not the women in the books but some of the ones who write them. My husband sits down to his desk at nine every morning, I heard a writer's wife purr. Snorted a housewife-novelist, Yes, but he's a man! She would join me in saluting a domesticated woman who has never written a book before but now turns ...

... BY ANGELA MILNE VERY much in the mood of the moment, Felix Walking, by Hilary Ford (Eyre and Spottis woode, 15s), is a novel about a Rude and Brash Young Man who writes a book, turns it into success by a shameless bit of publicity-seeking and loves a publisher's secretary. Felix is in the tradition (so is his own book, by the way) in so far as being a Redbrick graduate, and Angry when it suits ...

... BY JACK BENTLEY Popular music based on classical works is generally frowned upon, yet nobody tries to confine performances of these same classics to their rightful place the opera house and concert hall THE question of whether classical music should be given any other treatment than that intended by the composer is seldom replied to with an open mind. The same people who raise howls of protest ...

... REVIEWED BY ANGELA MILNE SO shrewd, balanced and fresh an observer as John Wain couldn't write a dull novel if he tried. Whether The Con tenders (Macmillan, 13s 6 d) succeeds as a novel, whether it does the most with its theme, one is not so sure. Here are two friends, schoolboys to begin with, being taught at school that life 's a competition. Robert is to be an artist, Ned will enter the ...

... RECORD REVIEWS CLASSICAL A Stradivarius among sopranos. This is a description that many a prima donna would give up her farewell performance to earn, especially when given to an opera singer from the Western world by a usually begrudging maestro from behind the Iron Curtain. Yet this was the astonished utterance by one of the conductors at the Bolshoi Theatre after Joan Hammond had finished ...

... THEATRE RECENT PRODUCTIONS THE ELDER STATESMAN (Edinburgh Festival) will reach the Cambridge Theatre, London, on September 25. A preview at Edinburgh showed that there will be the usual scuffle of argument; Eliot is a dramatist likely to be discussed when most of the day's shooting stars have streaked over the sky and vanished. I have never been a persuaded admirer of his post-war work, often ...