New Films In London Entertainments The film is a suitable medium for tales of espionage, and one of the latest to be transferred to the screen is Mr. Somerset Maugham's " Ashenden," which is to be seen this week at the Tivoli under the title of Secret Agent. It has been directed by Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, who has finished a story, which deviates substantially from that written by Mr. Maugham. The only other new production in London this week is Wife versus Secre- tary, in which Mr. Clark Gable, Miss Myrna Loy, and Miss Jean Harlow manoeuvre through a thin story. TIVOLI Secret Aget'.-Audiences in the past have had cvery reason to bc grateful to Mr. Alfred Hitch- cock-s refreshing ability to mingle genuine humour with the macabre atmosphere of suspicion and detection. Here, the balance is never adjusted. Mr. Hitchcock could, to evcry one's delight, have indulged his genial sense of humour to the full once he had established the imperative importance of the NVar-time mission entrusted to Ashenden. Those who have read the story of Mr. Somerset Maugham upon which this film is based will know that Ashenden went to Switzerland to prevent the carrying of important information into enemy territory. The spy is unknown; all that Ashenden is told is that a certain district is suspect and, as he leaves England for Switzer- land, the film concentrates on the overwhelming importance of his mission, but the director sui- prisingly enough minimizes the mission's import- ance by becoming preoccupied with the humour latent in the characters and situations involved. There is always the feeling that he is about to weld the two into a whole, in which humour and suspense will play proper and not contradictory parts. The deadly needle in the haystack for which Ashenden is looking should have had a magnetic attraction for both Ashenden and the audience; as it is, the humorous skirmishing round the haystack comes dangerously near to forcing from the stack nothing more deadly than a field mouse. In spite of the opportunities he has missed, Mr. Hitchcock has given us, not the film we expected from him, but one whicl, judged by any standard other than the highest, would seem full of merit, discernment, and entertainment. In Mr. Maugham's story one character has impressed MVr. Hitchcock above all others-the professional kilter both of men and, in a different sense, of women. His sagacity in choosing Mr. Peter Lorre for the part of the killer is rewarded by Mr. Lorre's performance, a performance which makes the film itself uncommon and dominates the Ashenden of even so accomplished an actor as Mr. John Gielgud. He is a man of two passions -he can cut a man's throat and make love to a woman with a professional indifference which leaves no sense of the incongruous. Mr. Gielgud, on the other hand, sees Ashenden as an actor's part. He is content to project him. Miss Madeleine Carroll, instructed by theSecretService to take the part of Ashenden's wife, falls in love with the man, but looks to the agent for excite- ment, and Mr. Robert Young, as the enemy's spy, resembles not so much a spy as a successful American tourist out to see the world and not to interfere with it. ENIPIRE Wife versus Secretary.-Thp title is unfair in suggesting the familiar cmotional struggle bc- tween two women whose identities, essentially the same, are disguised under the meaningless sym- bols wife and secretary, and who fight under remarkably non-Qucensberry rulics for the love of the man who is at once husband and employer. It is nothing of the kind. It is an attempt to show how dependent a man may be on two women who rule compartments in his life which never comc into contact, let alone rivalry. Miss Jean Harlow, though she has, as it happens, an emotional feeling for her employcr, Mr. Clark Gable, never allows it to conflict with her duties as a secretary and files it away as competently as his documents, and it is only the malicious gossip of friends in general and of her mother (Miss May Robson) in particular which, added- to what was, on the surface, a compromising telephone-call, give the wife, Miss Myrna Loy, gi ounds for suspicion and jealousy, grounds which turn out to be entirely without foundation. Had the dialogue, acting, and direction been as imaginative as the film's intentions, Wife versus Secretary would never have declined into . the commonplace as unfortunately and consistently it does. The problem, such as it is, ends as soon as it started, and all that remains is a scries of situations trivial in conception and trivial in execution. With the problem out of the way, and obviously out of the way for good, there was only the hope that such competent players as Mr. Gable, Miss Loy, and Miss Harlow would liave been given lines which would have made the film a good conversation piece and left the audience with a sense of regret but not of posi- tive failure. Mr. Clarence Brown throughout seems satisfied with the merely osculatory medium for establishing the affection between husband and wife; Mr. Gable is a man of romantic action and should not be called upon to interpret tite subtle essence of romanticism. Miss Harlow is unusually capable in the sense that she has a precise knowledge of her own talents and limita- tions-here the part is alien to her and, judging from her performance, no one realized it better than Miss Harlow. It is greatly to her credit that, although the part-beats her:in the end, she struggles bravely and commendably to the last: Miss Loy, embarrassed by the absence of verbal wit, does her best to give ihe wife intellectual freedom and vivacity, but she is perpetually thwarted by the progress of the film and the director's rigid interpretation of her character. Oddly enough, the one real character in the film is allowed to exist in a comfortable waistcoat, as it were, and not in a strait-jacket. He is a rock which can stand the constant surge of emotional waves and yet keep his identity. This admirable rock is a pathetic young man in love with Miss Harlow, and he is represented by Mr. James Stewart, an actor truly within his part and im- posing his influence on the film without ever appearing to do so. EIVERYMAN Warting SIhadows.-The Everyman is continu- ing its policy of illustrating the history of the film in a series of weekly programmes, and this week there are being shown filims of the era between 1916 and 1926, when America was evolving the system of laying emphasis on particular players rather than the content of the film as a whole, and Germany was experimenting and discovering that the film could be an art and not merely an enter- tainment. The contrast between such early American films as Tillie's Pncitured Romance, which even the combined genius of Mr. Charles Chaplin and Miss Marie Dressler cannot save from fatuity, and Miss Mary Pickford's eamest melodramas and the night-club scenes which are shown from Pabst's Crisis and Robison's Warning Shadows, is more than striking. Warning Shadows, although it Was made in the early nineteen-twenties, has an assurance of technique and a mastery over symbolism that can well hold their own in the present day. In the American films of the same period, " seriotts " dramas as well as comedies, the camera was thsere simply to record the action, action in which the " chase " motive, ending in either the farcical pond or the arrest of the villain, persists in predominating; in Germany the camera was used as an integral part of the story to be told, and not only built up an atmosphere but gave to individual scenes form, intelligence, and design. So efficient, in- deed, is the camera in Warinitig Shadows that there is no need for sub-titles, and once the characters, the husband, the wife, the young lover, the mesmerist, and the servants, have appeared in cffective silhouette in the introduction, the camera, with its insistence on mood and architecture- architecture is a dominating influence in Warning Shadiows-added to the acting, stylized almost to the point of mime, tells all there is to know and unfolds the tragedy in terms of light and shade, terms which not only emphasize action and emotion but arc lovely in themselvcs. In addition to thsese films the programme also serves as a reminder of the ephemeral quality of popularity. Mr. John Bttnny and Miss Flora Finch are to be secn in Huibby Finds a Baby, and there are one or two scenes which- show Mr. Lon Chancy as the hunch-back of Notre Dame in astonishingly e;Tective make-up. NEW FILMS IN LONDON A TALE OF ESPIONAGE