Bundle from Britain

Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder have put their bright stamp on some of Britain's deftest moviemaking, first as co-scripters (Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, Carol Reed's Night Train), then as a writing-producing-directing team (The Adventuress, The Notorious Gentleman, Green for Danger). Last week the team improved U.S. moviegoing prospects with two new films:

State Secret (London Films; Columbia) blends chills and chuckles in a melodrama that recalls vintage Hitchcock. Up to its chin in understated intrigue almost as soon as its opening titles have faded, the film keeps its suspense and credibility high right up to a neat, satisfying solution in the closing moments.

For its setting, the movie creates an unusually convincing mythical Balkan state: modern Vosnia, whose beautiful mountain scenery, totalitarian bosses and strained political posture clearly suggest Tito's Yugoslavia. Its natives display the reflexes conditioned in a police state, speak the Vosnian language,* a linguistic mishmash cleverly concocted out of Latin odds and Slavic ends.

The story begins by giving its hero, U.S. Surgeon Douglas Fairbanks Jr., 5 minutes to live. At a mountain outpost, the government's apologetic hatchetman (Jack Hawkins), a charming, articulate villain, tells Fairbanks he will die in "a shooting accident." While he waits, Fairbanks and Writer-Director Gilliat's facile camera go back to tell how he got into such a fix.

In the flashback, Fairbanks visits Vosnia to pick up a medal for a new operating technique and to demonstrate the surgery. He discovers in mid-operation that, through a switch in patients, he is working on the innards of General Niva, the country's dictator. The operation goes well. Later, over billiards, Villain Hawkins explains just why the general's survival--or at least the illusion of it--is politically urgent at the moment. If the dictator dies, the surgeon's knowledge of the fact would make his liquidation imperative.

The general dies. Fairbanks gets loose with his unwelcome state secret, a bewildered stranger in a hostile country. His frantic, ever-narrowing efforts to get out of Vosnia alive, pitted against all the frightening resources of the state, make up the bulk of an exciting movie.They involve varied backgrounds (a music hall, a cable car, a river barge) and some sharply written, ably played characters, notably a blonde, half-English entertainer (Glynis Johns) and a scoundrelly smuggler (Herbert Lorn) whose wholehearted cynicism puts a fillip of fun into his every scene. Actor Fairbanks does just as well as the smallest of Gilliat's bit-players, i.e., very well indeed.

The Happiest Days of Your Life (London Films) is a nimble farce with a sound underpinning of character and comment. Though a few cuts below such blue-ribbon British comedies as Tight Little Island and Passport to Pimlico, it offers the rare inducement of watching two of Britain's best comics--Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford--as they steal scenes from each other.

Adapting a play by John Dighton, Scripter-Director Launder gives them both plenty of opportunities. Sim plays the smug, hand-rubbing headmaster of a boys' school who is thrown for a loss when a mixed-up Ministry of Education dumps a girls' school on the premises. ("Someone," he moans, "is guilty of an appalling sexual aberration.") Headmistress Rutherford is the formidably efficient battle-ax who leads the invasion, tackles one of the problems of boys-&-girls-together by canceling biology classes.

The arrival of important visitors to both schools pushes the two principals into a crack-brained collaboration. Anxious to hide the ministry's error, they synchronize their watches and plot a schedule for two guided tours, each designed to exhibit one school at a time. This antic scheme, played to the hilt, leads to chaos, rioting and some hilarious glimpses of English public-school traditions and traditionalists under stress.

In eight British films turned out since 1945 under their Individual Pictures trademark, plump, chipper Sidney Gilliat, 42, and quiet, precise Frank Launder, 43, have not yet been caught with a dud. Why do their pictures always make a tidy profit? Launder, a onetime repertory actor, and Gilliat, who thought he would be a journalist, point significantly to the fact that they have always been able to make pictures without too much front-office bossing.

They quit the J. Arthur Rank Empire two years ago because, says Launder, "the organization was heading for more centralization and more control . . . we were for decentralization." They even give each other plenty of leeway. When one of them gets an idea for a movie, he consults closely with the other, then does the script and direction himself, drawing freely on his partner's advice.

Last week, sponsored by Sir Alexander Korda, who finances and distributes their product and gives them a cut in the profits, Launder & Gilliat were making the most of their independence. While Launder worked on a film called Beauty Queen (about "the kind of a girl who starts in the News of the World and ends up there, too"), Gilliat was mulling over a movie biography of Gilbert & Sullivan.

The team is not much interested in going to Hollywood. For one thing, they think a good deal of their success depends on their understanding of the British background. "Hollywood's idea of Britain is strictly Victorian," they feel. "You'd . . . have to stick in the inevitable London fog, Thames Embankment, or Cleopatra's Needle . . . There's no doubt you'd become a hireling."

*Invented for the film by Language Mistress Georgina Shields of the London School of Languages, "Vosnian" was carefully built into a 3,000-word tongue, painstakingly taught to the English actors.

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