FILM RECORD OF WORLD EVENTS

Southland Times, Issue 23681, 2 December 1938, Page 5

FILM RECORD OF WORLD EVENTS

LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND ARMS RACE

IMPRESSIVE ISSUE OF “MARCH OF TIME”

Providing its usual effective background to news of the day, “Arms and the League,” the latest issue of the March of Time series, which opens at the State Theatre today, gives a striking commentary on affairs in Europe. The film was shown privately yesterday to representatives of the Church, public bodies, schools and the Press, and all were impressed by its _ blunt portrayal of tomorrow’s history in the. making.

Little if any attempt is made to colour the events presented—they are dramatic enough without that—and the story of the establishment of the League of Nations, the magnificent ideal it stood for in a world weary of war, its early successes, and then its gradual decline as first one nation and then another renounced its ideals to emphasize their demands for power by the thunder of guns, is told with stark simplicity. The sullen boom of _ guns, heard at appropriate intervals, is the only attempt made to heighten the effect of the camera’s record of events, and that is pardonable, if only for the assistance it gives towards the artistry with which the story is told.

The picture opens with Mr Anthony Eden’s resignation as Foreign Secretary, and then goes back to trace his association with the League, his high hope in its ideals. There are shots of Mr Woodrow Wilson, the man who was responsible for bringing the League into being, of the passionate declarations of desires for peace made by statesmen of the leading nations of the world. Then comes Japan’s departure from the League, then that of Italy, the third world power to renounce peaceful arbitration as means of settling international disputes. The thunder of guns grows louder; ' Germany, under Herr Hitler, rearms; Italy, under Signor Mussolini, rearms; there is mounting trouble beside placid Lake Geneva even before the new League buildings—designed, perhaps, as a monument to peace—are finished. There is a brief glimpse of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and a tensely-dramatic moment when Haile Selassie is hissed and howled down by Italian delegates when he attempts to state his country’s case before the League of Nations. The final scenes of the picture are devoted to the grim pursuit of armed might by the nations of the world.