Twittering at "Dawn"

From South Africa to Fleet Street the Empire was piquantly all of a twitter, last week, over Dawn, the furiously contested cinemastory of the life & execution of Edith Cavell (TIME, Feb. 20). At the nub of controversy jutted the fact that Great Britain has been "muddling through" without a legal system of film censorship. Therefore, last week, the interplay of moral suasion was untrammeled and magnificently British. Some felt, and some did not, that to project the story of Nurse Cavell once more upon the world would be to revive War mentality at its worst and embitter Anglo-German relations. Loud, therefore, were twitterers and twitterings :

P: Members of the Cabinet kept their fingers crossed and individually refused invitations to a preview of Dawn. Collectively they chose an anonymous & mysterious "technical advisor" who reported, according to a Cabinet announcement, that the execution scene in Dawn unfolds as follows:

"One member of the German firing squad definitely refuses to level his rifle at Nurse Cavell and he is shot on the spot. The rest line up and at the order to fire each raises his rifle so that the bullets strike above the woman's head. Nurse Cavell, however, falls down in a faint and an officer steps forward and despatches her with a pistol." The pistol used in making the film was, by way of meticulous realism, a German Luger (see photograph).

P: Commenting emotionally on the above terse report, Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain cried to the House of Commons: "I am speaking as an English gentleman upon what I think is an outrage on humanity. . . . I believe this [film] account of the execution to be fully apocryphal [i. e. fictitious or spurious]. I feel that it is an outrage upon a noble woman's memory to turn to purposes of commercial profit so heroic a story."

P: Sir Austen's plea against Dawn was shortly described as "a lullaby to please the Germans" and roundly flayed by peppery Brigadier-General John Hartman Morgan who served as Vice-Chairman of the Lord Bryce Commission which, during the War, investigated and exaggerated "German atrocities." Flinging the defunct Commission's hat once more into the ring, General Morgan rehearsed the "judicial murder" of Edith Cavell and seemed to think it could not receive too much film publicity.

Straightway a former subordinate member of the Commission, Mr. Herbert F. Manisty, a practicing barrister, informed the press that, in his opinion, Miss Cavell was tried by a competent court and was convicted of the offense for which she was tried, namely "furnishing and supplying men to the enemy."

P: Correspondents who had meanwhile viewed a pre-showing of Dawn reported that, as displayed to them, the execution of Nurse Cavell was not thrown on the screen at all, but was simply to be inferred from the agonized expression on the face of the German priest who administered last rites.

P: At Berlin, last week, Dr. Gottfried Benn, onetime Chief Surgeon for the German Army in the Brussels area, declared that he had been an eyewitness of the execution of Miss Cavell and had signed the certificate attesting her death. According to Dr. Benn, Nurse Cavell was blindfolded and tied by her hands to a stake. Thereafter she remained standing until "hit and instantly killed by 12 bullets."

P: In remote Witwaters Rand, South Africa, the local Deputy Commissioner of Police was so stirred by despatches from London that he issued an order banning Dawn, although the film had not yet had its first public showing in England. During the week the London County Council prevented what had been billed as: "Monster First Showing Of Dawn Before 10,000 Representative Citizens At Albert Hall."

P: Returning to the nub, it became evident last week that legislation must be enacted to supplant the present grandiloquently named but impotent British Board of Film Censors, chairmanned by famed "Tay Pay" O'Connor, now vacationing in the U. S. (TIME, March 5). The Board possesses no legal jurisdiction, but by commercial agreement its recommendations are obeyed in the numerous theatres of the British Cinematograph Exhibitors' Association.

Long since, the Board banned Dawn as "inexpedient," thus drawing from the London Times a pompous twitter: "What is the nature of the inexpedience? . . . The adjective 'political' instantly suggests itself, and a political censorship, in whatever discreet feathers it be dressed is, in England at least, a remarkably ugly bird."

P: At Manhattan, the office of theatrical producer Arch Selwyn triumphantly announced that Producer Selwyn in London recently had acquired the U. S. rights to Dawn.