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People's Avengers (Artkino) is a far cry from They Met in Moscow (see above). It was made by 18 Soviet cameramen who parachuted behind the German lines to record the lives and activities of Russian guerrillas, credited with destroying more than a half-million German soldiers. The film is fragmentary, a merely average Russian documentary (aside from its subject). But it resembles They Met in Moscow in so far as the instinct for poetic realism—the dead center of most good cinema—is almost a national Russian characteristic.
Working on a front which stretched from Leningrad to the Caucasus and which included most climates and all seasons the 18 paracameramen caught most notably:
¶ The bullet-twitched fall of a German sentry, a minute before the bridge he is guarding is blown up.
¶ A steamy, stealthy sequence among tall reeds, far in the south, with the guerrilla boat and the camera splashed closely by enemy fire.
¶ The capture, trial and execution of a traitor: wry, long-necked, the flaps of his cap like the ears of an animal, he looks simpleminded, hardly aware of what is happening to him.
¶ A wonderful shot of a German train, moving toward dynamite and demolition: hidden in a soft-blown, shining vista of heavy summer leaves, it sprouts a smoothly advancing, dreamlike tree of smoke.
48 Hours (Ealing-AFE) reduces Graham Greene's fast-paced, improbable story (Went the Day Well?) to a slow-moving, improbable film. Oldtime Director Cavalcanti, heretofore much admired by cinesthetes as a shrewd theorist of sound, is not helped much by William Walton's* undistinguished score, was not wise in splattering Prologist Mervyn Johns's excellent speeches with cheery bird noises.
The story concerns the tiny English hamlet of Bramley End and its two-day seizure by four planeloads of German paratroopers disguised as four lorry-loads of British engineers. Unmasked by Nora Ashton (Valerie Taylor), sweetheart of Community Leader Oliver Wilsford (Leslie Banks), who is really a fifth columnist, the Germans pen the villagers in the church.
Some of the villagers (including Frank Lawton) escape, hold off the Nazis until the timely arrival of British troops. High spot: Fifth Columnist Banks dying like a dog, in the hammiest death throes since Laocoon's.
*Not to be confused with TIME'S paratrooping Correspondent William Walton.