Chu Chin Chow

Think of Michael Powell/the Korda brothers' Thief of Bagdad but better, even! An Arabian nights adventure but no stops for spectacle, rather a seamless story and an unrestrained telling almost unprecedented in British film. The sets are wonderful, there are songs popping up in the least expected places, the direction has a verve rarely seen elsewhere in British film and the story is adapted with guts and no fear that restraint (any) must be employed, as it usually is, it seems neccesarily, in British film. It's a film which goes all the way in all departments, astonishing for any age let alone for 1934, just a year after Korda's Private Lives of Henry VIII had opened things up a bit for Britfilm.