Once More [unclear: into The] Breach ...

If Robert Frank's criticism of my review of !Rebecca' is meant merely to show that that film was art of a very high order it would seem to be unnecessary; if it was intended as a suggestion that the content of a film is immaterial, it is, with all due respect to its author, manifestly Absurd. Of the excellence of the production and acting in 'Rebecca' I had no doubts --I think- I made that quite clear but if I did not do so I regret it. However I have no apologies to make for having [unclear: emphasised], the trite nature of the characters with whose delineation and development the film is, after all, concerned.

Quite obviously the film is not ruined because its plot is divorced from reality and its characters false, it seems equally obvious that it would he improved were plot and characters be have some relation on to the conditions of actual life rather than to the fairy tale world of the novelist.

Alfred Hitchcock has done for the escapist film what Dorothy Sayers has done for the thriller, and in so doing he has created something which is entirely pleasing and enjoyable. But it is as [unclear: ridiculous] to talk of the "pure art" of Hitchcock as it would be to balk of the "pure art" of the Sayers [unclear: thriller--in both cases it is in fact a meretricious are where serve to] attract the [unclear: undiscerning] and to conceal the [unclear: essential banality] of its subject. We must reject the misleading analogy [unclear: between] the art of the cinema and poetry and [unclear: sculpture, and] realise that it is the function of the film to express characters and situations which are part of-real [unclear: life] and have some relevance to our present situation.

The film must becomes socially significant in this sense if it is to fulfil [unclear: its] enormous potentialities. Consequently we are bound to feel regret when a producer turns from the thousand and one [unclear: situations inherent] in the travail of our whole civilisations and [unclear: tctr.a] his [unclear: artion] in the fairyland of the thriller or escapist novel, H.W.