ROMANCE OF THE SOIL

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 258, 28 July 1934, Page 21

ROMANCE OF THE SOIL

“Song of the Plough”

(By John Storm.)

“I but saw her passing by, And yet I love her till I die.”

So sings a sloe-eyed slim young jockey at an impromptu party at a country inn of the old English kind, iu “Song of the Plough,” a picture filled with the breath of summer. This small scene, with all its varied life, made me laugh with sheer pleasure. Each one of the village characters in it is taken from life. They do not have to act. They are just themselves. Each contributes something of quip or song or melody. Kenneth Kove, “the famous fool,” is the visitor from town. The bell-ringer of Burwash came many miles by train to sing his one song. He is the only man left in England who can sing this ancient country song in the real old-fashioned way, with all the whistles and grunts and yodel-like noises.

All folk songs carry a wealth of tradition. We might travel half the inhabited globe to. trace the origins of these old rhymes and melodies. John Baxter, the young director, has done wonders with them. He has used the lovely lanes and rolling downs, the old English songs and old tunes to make a picture steeped iu atmosphere more universal than rural England. The synchronisation of woodland sounds added to these old melodies largely tells the story. And Percy Grainger’s setting of “Shepherds Hey” makes a perfect background to it all. Of the strong cast, including Hay Petrie, Allan Jeayes, Kenneth Kove, of the Aldwych, and Rosalind Fuller, a Shakespearean actress, the lead is Stewart. Rome, who was once a sheepfarmer himself. All the rustic characters are borrowed from life. A Picture of Beauty. English critics have written of the “Song of the Plough” from every point of view—of its “racing cloud shadows caught In happy mood” and “the directors’ unique sense of beauty,” of its “rustics and Its singers and its market scenes,” and of the famous collie in it, “the finest dog in England.” No one has yOt said that it has in it a most thrilling note to which all native-born New Zealanders will respond. Because I know it so well myself I think that to no one in the world is the love of home so keen a joy as to the small landowner. He. and she —because there is always a she where a home is rooted in the soil—have stood shoulder to shoulder, have fought‘for ■it, from frosty dawn to deepening twilight year in and year put, till their little home Is all their own. Together they have known the toll of every furrow about the paddock and every foot of the garden. This may be at last a riot of roses and the porch the same, 'but every bush was once a prickly cutting set by their own hands. When at last the earth smiles, the sheep, graze on the hills, the latest Massey-Harris reaper clatters through the harvest . . . comes the slump! In the story it is England. “Tithes” and interest must be paid. The home is threatened. The little paths and lawns take on a new meaning. The porch is as a living being, something that clings to us and that we cling to as if' it had life and soul. The rose trees now are only half in the earth, the other half of their long roots are wound about the heart. The horse or dog takes on the look of a living soul. Drama in Rural Setting.

It is not only those who know these things that will be able to appreciate “Song of the Plough,” for there is the deep drama to it that anyone must feel who could not understand. Its beauty and charm. is there for all to see, but those who know the land will live over again their most poignant moments. The farmer’s tithes are duo and his pockets are empty. His lambs sell,for little, sacrifice of stock! He has a sheep dbg, the pride of his heart and the friend. Only the sale of this precious creature would save the rosy porch and all it stands for. There are dog trials shortly to be run; the dog might win and then be worth five times his present sale. But tithes will not wait. They are the real villain of the piece. They also take on the semblance of personality. The series of happenings that allow the dog to stand test to save his mas-

ter’s home, end in the most thrilling of dog trials. The finest sheep dogs In England compete, and even the uninitiated can appreciate their skill. I begin to discover that all the greatest pictures make first an appeal to outer beauty or excitement, and a further appeal to those who can feel the situations as well as visualise them But there is yet another underlying meaning that we can each think of and return to again and again, a meaning that might be called profound. To each, this meaning will be different. But to everyone it will reveal something of fundamental beauty. Such a picture is “Song of the Plough.”