Four Films.

When Calvin Coolidge came home after his first visit to Sunday school has grandmother asked him what the parson had talked about.

"He talked about Sin" said Calvin.

"What did he say about Sin?"

"He was against it."

So let me begin my account of the four films that I saw during the holidays by saying that they were about the War and in favour of it.

Three of them can be dealt with very shortly.

About "Prisoner of Japan" it will be as well to say nothing at all except that in an indirect way it fulfills the highest tests of tragic art—if one turns one's attention from the film itself to the audience for whose pleasure it was designed, one is seized with powerful feelings of pity and terror. "Sergeant York" begins very well—the account of York's early religious experiences was particularly effective—and ends very badly I suppose heroism does involve an element of something very like vulgarity but not like the kind which disfigures the second half of this film. The Russian film "In the Rear of the Enemy", is a simple tale of action which I enjoyed very much; I could have wished that the hero had not found it necessary to announce he was throwing his second to last hand grenade on behalf of the old folks at home and (the last was for Comrade Stalin) but a Bolshevik friend assures me that this was a substitution for something obscene in the Russian dialogue.

"Mrs. Miniver" has been criticised by various people because it deals with the upper classes and shouldn't, this being a people's war. But it seemed to me that its Value lay in the representation of the impact of war upon happiness—or rather the happiness of the ordinary sensual man or woman—of which the elements (sex, security and gratified vanity) are the same for people in all classes but are most easily available to the wealthy. That happiness is not usually questioned even in peace-time and by the most drastic of our revolutionaries who merely urge that we should enable more people to enjoy it. So I am not disposed to denounce its rather naive apotheosis in this film. For its preservation is surely the most honest and least dangerous of war aims, unlike aspirations regarding the Dignity of the Human Spirit with which, indeed, it can hardly be reconciled.