Word: sim
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...official, a civil servant and a young woman were also killed in the crash; in the actual flight the local governor calls to ask if there is room on the air marshal's plane for Lord Wainwright (Ralph Truman), a colonial officer (Alexander Knox) and his secretary (Sheila Sim). The fatal conditions are completed when "a coarse, flashy man" (George Rose) wangles passage, the radio conks out, the pilot (Nigel Stock) gets lost in a snowstorm over Japan...
Radio and TV this year are taking over Christmas, lock, stock and carol. The procession of Scrooges began last week with Fredric March on CBS's Shower of Stars, and he was followed by a whole battery of Dickensian skinflints-Alastair Sim, Reginald Owen, Alec Guinness and the late Lionel Barrymore. Christmas drama also resounds with sleigh bells, seasonal cuteness and commercialized brotherhood. A run-through of the titles suggests the content: Christmas 'Til Closing, with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn; Santa Claus and the 10th Avenue Kid, on Alfred Hitchcock Presents; Christmas Story, on San Francisco Beat...
Much of the credit for the triumph must be given to actor Alastair Sim, who plays the double role of the Head-mistress and her gambler brother. Sim is better in the feminine half of his part, for which he assumes a towering wig, a hoarse whisper, and just the right mixture of cowardice and heroism. Joyce Grenfell is almost as funny in her role of a policewoman who looks very much like a horse but walks like an ape. As for the dozen or so of the Bells themselves, they are less expert, but on the whole quite monstrous...
...these objections are really little more than quibbles. Alastair Sim easily cancels them out, as when he intones with sorrow dripping from his voice after an explosion in the chemistry lab, "Poor little Bessie, I warned her to be more careful with the nitroglycerine." Nothing, not even mediocre sound recording, can spoil the effect of that...
Hard & Half-Hard. The last two sim nons to reach the U.S. are published to gether in a single volume called Destinations. One of them, The Burial of Monsieur Bouvet, is a mixture of detection, mood and Paris atmosphere that gets under way when an elderly gentleman drops dead at a Paris bookstall. Since the author is more interested in the frayed lives and barely concealed despairs of his characters than in the mystery, he calls it a "half-hard," i.e., half-serious novel...