New Films In London Entertainments The Adventures of Robin Hood, a gaudy American colour film in which Mr. Errol Flynn has the part of Robin Hood and Miss Olivia die Havilland that of Maid Marian, has been chosen to open the Warner Cinema in Leicester Square on Wednesday night. The Duke and Duchess of Kent will be present at the first perfornt- ance, and the proceeds will be given to the .British Empire Cancer Campaign. Be- sides The Adventures of Robin Hood Hollywood is also represented in London this week by Having Wonderful Tiune, at story of a holiday camp in which Miss Ginger Rogers appears as a typist, and March of the Movies, a short history of the cinema. At the Empire Cinema there is a British film called The Lady Vanishes, in which Mr. Alfred Hitchcock, the director, has managed with his customary skill to combine suspense with humour, and at the Gaumont Mr. Will Hav is the principal comedian in Hfey ! Hey! U.S. A W'ARNER The Adventures of Robin Iloud.-As an expensive and brightly coloured illustration to Little Arthur's England this will do very well, and it is perhaps not the worse as entertain- ment because no one can he expected to believe it. Miss Olivia de Havilland. for exalite, in the part of Maid Marian, makes no attempt to he anything hut the heroine of an English comedy, or Mr. Errol Flynn. hi the part of Robin Hlooi. to do anything but give his own version of Nir. Douglas Fairhanks's romantic bravado. MIr. Claude Rains and N1Ir. Basil Rathi-,one are able to take their easc in the parts Of Prince John and the evil Sir Guy of C'uisboiirie: after the elaborate scoundrels of modern dritma sucih simple villainy must comc as a holi(day to them. Anyone who is not hero or villain must. of course, provide conmic relief, and a company of fat monks, hearty yeomen, and tinmorotis servants illustrate the liglter side of the Middle Ages. But any more penetrating reconstruction of the past might well distract attention from the pro- cessions and pageants, battles and banquets, flags and armour which, photographed " in full technicolour," are the real and chief con- cern of the film. The whole is an extensive and gaudy canvas in the manner of nincteenth- century historical painting. GAUMONT Hey ! Hey ! U.S.A.-It is one of the merits of Mr. Will Hay's comedies that he does not make himself the sole comedian, and here his seedy gentility makes an excellent contrast with Mr. Edgar Kennedy's accomplished picture of a tough and dumb American gangster. And it is a good though perhaps not wholly inten- tional joke that this unfortunate gangster should in the end be led away in a strait-jacket, his mind unhinged by the appalling complexitY of the plot and by the evident strain of finding himself in one of those English films which combine too much comedy with too much crime. In spite of the American setting. Mr. Hay is completely himself and, as usual, his performance is always on the point of be- coming a profound and pathetic study of the squalor of keeping up appearances. The story allows several passages of good and up- roarious farce, but, as so often, it lacks a single idea to hold it together, and often wanders into diffuse complications. EMPIRE The Lady Vanishzes.-Mr. Alfred Hitch- cock waves his directorial wand and thc lady vanishes-suddenly and inexplicably. One minute she is sitting there in the corner of a compartment in a Continental express, plump and benign, a middle-aged English governess in sensible tweeds; the next she has gone, vanished into thin air. and the passengers on the train only shrug their shoulders in their exprcssive Continental way and swear that she was never there. In retrospect, perhaps, we may discover a flaw or two in Mr. Hitchcock's magic, but not at the time; his touch has never been surer nor his power to hold our attention more complete. He. almost alone among English directors, has an unmistakable style. Hc loves all that is sinister and bizarre-murder, espionage, and crime-and as a tcller of all such stories he has no equal in the cinema. He understands the camera's unique powers of observation, its ability to perceive those tiny, unobtrusive clues which can mean so much, and these details fascinate him. A name scrawled on a.pane of glass, a nun Avearing high-heeled shoes, the wrapping from a packet of tea-these are the things upon which his plot hinges. Never for a moment does the tension of this film relax: it is all baffling, absorbing, and extraordinarilv exciting, and a distinguished cast too large for individual mention most ably supports him in all these strange adventures. But Mr. Hitch- cock is also a humorist, a student, it would seem, of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse, for the two Englishmen who move through his story with such imperturbable austerity and with such an acute sense of good form, have the blood of Bertram Wooster in their veins. The bullets may fly, but they think only of the Test wicket at Manchester. " Gad, Sir," we can almost hear them mutter, " Mr. Hitchcock is right. We must shoot down these foreign blighters before Hammond gets out." PLAZA Having Wornderfuil Timne.-The oppressive atmosphere of those who are trying too hard to enjoy themselves broods over this film, and Hollywood, which understands sucih things, has seen to it that all these young people shall talk a little too fast and too noisily, shall sing the same popular chorus just once too often, and shall, in consequence, become irritable, over-tired, and rather pathetic. Against the background of Camp Care-Free, the holiday home in the woods with all its carefully engineered jollity and its countless little irksome annoyances, there has been set a slight, a very slight, love story between a typist from the city and a young lawyer who is unemployed and working as a camp waiter. It is the film's good fortune to have Miss Ginger Rogers in the part of the typist, for she can dontrive to show that this self-possessed and rather pert young woman is really only a child at heart, and to imply that youth has still the same dreams that it has always had, despite the cloak of. sophisti- cation that the city throws around it. Mr. Douglas Fairbanks, jun., as the young lawyer, has less insight-perhaps he is only meant to be a very ordinary young man-and for the rest it is the activities of Camp Care- Free which can horrify as well as fascinate. The director has succumbed to the usual fail- ing and made every one a little too good look- ing and too well turned out for reality-even the wallflowcrs at the dance are not unattrac- tive-but the organized parties and games, the oppressive good-fellowship, the conceits, the petty jealousies, and the pouring rain are all unmistakably true to life and in these there is no artificiality. REGAL Alarchi of the Movics.-The history of the cinema is too involved for any one film to present an adequate survey in the space of an hour, but any film which attempts to examine the past cannot fail to produce many fasci- nating examples of the cinema's earliest phases. Mlarch of the Movies is a conscientious and informative work, which rightly honours the names of the pioneers in this country and in America, and most notably that of William Friese Greene, who was the real inventor of the motion picture camera as we know it to-day, and who died almost penniless in 1921. The work of these pre-War pioneers is well enough illustrated, but unfortunately it seems that the modem studios are reluctant to lend excerpts from their most notable productions for inclu- sion in a history of the cinema, so March, of the Movies, in its study. of the cinema's later period, is sparsely annotated. Even so; many memories of. the early. talking films have been most pleasantly recalled. Here is Mir. Charles Laughton, morosely dining once again in Piccadilly; Mr. Al Jolson sings " Sonny Boy," and there is the rush for the lifeboats in M. Dupont's story of the Titanic disaster. Atlantic. Here, too, is a sinister fragment from Mr. Hitchcock's Blackmtail, the first English talking picture. NEW FILMS IN LONDON " THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD"
