BRITISH STUDIOS MAKE SHORT FILMS

Southland Times, Issue 24114, 1 May 1940, Page 5

BRITISH STUDIOS MAKE SHORT FILMS

Special Anti-Gossip Series

The war,* if it does nothing else for British films, may very well prove to have a tonic effect on the production of short films in this country, writes a correspondent in The Observer. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Information, a sizeable programme of “shorts”—something like thirty-five in all—is now planned or under way in our various studios. Some of these films, with professional actors and a dramatic story, are being made in the regular commercial studios; others, of a more documentary type, have been handed over to the “realist” groups.. All, it is emphasized, will be made with an eye to entertainment value as well as propaganda. The Ealing studios, for example, have just finished a group of three antigossip films. These films run for about ten minutes each, have a fictional story, and gently point the moral that it is not the people with expert knowledge who are likely to give information to the enemy, but the men and women in the street, with their apparently harmless chatter. The first, “All Hands,” has a naval application, and stars John Mills, borrowed from the Army for the occasion, Lueen McGrath, Gertrude Musgrove, and Elliot Makeham.

“DANGEROUS COMMENT”

The second, “Dangerous Comment,” deals with the R.A.F., and is played by Erank Lawton, Margaret Vyner, Penelope Dudley Ward, Milton Rosmer, and Roland Culver. The third, “Now You’re Talking,” deals with industry and the home front, and introduces Sebastian Shaw, Edward Chapman, Dorothy Hyson, and a new young actress, Judy Campbell, in whom the studio hope they may have discovered a British Hepburn. On the more documentary side, an interesting little group of films is being made by the G.P.O. Film Unit under their chief, Alberto Cavalcanti. One, nearly finished, “Balloon Barrage,” is directed by Harry Watt, who made the excellent “North Sea” and “Night Mail,’' Another deals with agricultural life in East Anglia. A third, which will be made in convoy, shows the training of the ship’s stewards who are currently

learning to qualify as able seamen. One of the most unusual or the group, a little longer than the rest and a little different in style, is tentatively called “Lightship.” This has dialogue and a sketch of a story, and is being directed by a newcomer to documentaries, David MacDonald, who made “This Man is News” and “This Man in Paris.” The film tells the story of a Nazi raid on a North Sea lightship. You see the men on the lightship talking, playing cards, waiting for their relief. A convoy passes. A floating mine drifts by. Then comes the raid, two enemy ’planes bombing and machine-gunning. The lightship is badly hit and the men take to the boats. The weather is getting very bad ana night is falling. The skipper, as a real skipper did in a recent raid, goes back for his canary. The drama of the thing is that, nobody knows what has happened. Lightships have no radio. Hitherto they haven’t needed it. At home the women wait and wait. The seas grow rougher. A neutral ship goes blundering into the fog, booming “Where the blazes are you, lightship?” But there is no lightship. The film ends with a battered boat washed ashore, and a few sou westers tossing on the water.

A RENASCENCE?

Cavalcanti and his staff are enthusiastic about this new drive in picturemaking. They hope, apart from its intrinsic value, that it may. lead to something like a renascence in British film production. “People are getting tired of fairy stories,” one of them said to me. “The war is giving them a sense of reality. They want to see pictures about England and English life—not just documentaries (how I hate that word!) but dramas like “The Stars Look Down,” full of real people and real situations. “We’ve got fifteen or so people here in the unit who are full of potentialities —directors, cameramen, cutters. They have been trained, as the modern French school has been trained, in documentary work. There are the same sort of boys in every studio in this country. Why can’t we use the knowledge they’ve picked up, in helping to create a new British cinema?”