The Final Test and Stratford Adventure

An American Senator watching the cricket match that gives The Final Test its name describes one of the game's incidents as a high pop fly to the infield. But he could well be describing both pictures now at the Kenmore; not in a long time has such impressive talent combined in so disappointing an evening.

The Final Test itself tries so hard to be Englishly subtle that it manages to be merely tedious. The plot concerns a distinguished cricketer taking his last swings in a test match against Australia. He quits because his son, an arty young man who fancies himself a lyric poet, is mortified to tell Oxford classmates that his father is "in sport." After creaking through a whole series of domestic traumas, including a rather vapid romance between the cricketer and a barmaid, the story reaches its denouement with a testimonial to sports as the great leveler.

Screenwriter Terrence Rattigan has obviously written a satire. But with the exception of a few wonderful scenes invilving Robert Morley as a egotistical poet, The Final Test resembles too closely the kind of film it lampoons.

If The Final Test is dull, Stratford Adventure is offensive. It is a documentary about Canada's Shakespeare festival in 1953, and like so many festival pictures, it goes to great lengths to show that culture can be brought to the masses. With quivering voice, the narrator tells how sewing circles transform themselves into Shakespeare study groups, and how every window displays a picture of the Bard. The scenario seems as patronizing to human nature as it is to art.

The really unusual thing about Stratford Adventure is that a near-feature length film about a Shakespeare festival can contain a total of 30 seconds of scenes from the plays. On the other hand, the camera spends long minutes in searching the agonized faces of a board of directors who are trying to raise enough money to build the theatre tent. Such scenes currently may be instructive to the Undergraduate Theatre Committee; they are of little use to anyone else.

Startford does, however, contain an enlightening lesson in movie merchandising. Alec Guinness is billed as its star. Once, Mr. Guinness rides by on a bicycle, waving. The other time he appears, he tells a young actor a few things about the trade. There was a line a block long outside the Kenmore.