War Shorts

By no means surprising is the fact that war brought a box-office boom to British cinema theatres. It was to be presumed that cinemaddicts would seek escape in rip-roaring thrillers, wacky comedies, sprightly musicals. Not at all. Last week their favorites were grim documents of the Fleet in action, airmen swooping, bombs falling, factories roaring--anything and everything to do with war. Along with these rousing shots of what people see every day the Ministry of Information was offering a surprise package in a group of five-minute shorts.

Best of these was Miss Grant Goes to the Door, a thriller--which might have been written by Edgar Wallace--about two old maids in a lonely part of Britain. While church bells ring an invasion warning, the old maids find a dying parachutist in the bottom of their garden. A few moments later a British officer knocks at their front door. He has lost his way to the airport, wants to borrow a map. Having done their homework on the Ministry's invasion pamphlet the Misses Grant know enough to keep the officer talking until a tongue slip (he says "Yarvis" instead of Jarvis Hill) reveals him as a German. One lady holds him at bay with a pistol found on the dying man while the other wobbles off by bicycle to get help. The German begs a cigaret which Miss Grant sportingly, if inadvisedly, tosses him. This distraction provides his chance to knock her sprawling and he bounds out the door just as the Home Guard sprints up like a battalion of Hollywood's best cowboy heroes. Moral: always be on your guard with a parachutist in the house.

Miss Grant and the other shorts are part of the Ministry's new campaign to keep beleaguered Britons alert to the dangers of invasion. This astonishing show of initiative was staged in spite of the wheezy Ministry. It was due to two enterprising men who bored from within: long, lean, vigorous Sidney L. Bernstein, boss of a chain of 35 Granada theatres, and imaginative Jack Beddington, former Shell Oil publicity man who vitalized British poster and advertising methods by hiring top-notch artists to paint Shell's ads.

Propagandists Bernstein and Beddington pepped up Ministerial film production by weeding out the amateurs, enlisting Britain's best directors, actors and technicians for a week at a time to help with their 500-foot glimpses of the country at work & play in wartime. They turn out their shorts for $2,000 each (one-tenth the cost of the cheapest Hollywood "quickie"). To sell the glories of factory work they show oomph girls assembling shells in a munitions plant.

In Men of the Lightship, which had fancy premieres simultaneously in three large London theatres, they extol British courage in a salty, moving account of the bombing of the East Dudgeon lightship in the North Sea. This one also shows what Blitzkrieg has done to British film censorship. During the attack on the lightship a gnarled seaman crouching on the open deck looks up at a Heinkel raking the ship with machine-gun fire, spits out: "The dirty bastards."

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