After a visit to the Fine Arts this week, it is not difficult to understand why the National Board of Review has chosen "Man of Aran" as the outstanding picture of 1934. Robert Flaherty, that master of photography, again has travelled to one of the stranger portions of this earth and returned with scenes of nature--clouds, rocks, and sea--which are rivalled only by Eisenstch. Clouds, rocks, and sea--but mostly sea, calm, seemingly docile but cunning, the willing food-source for the Man of Aran--or roaring, raging, scaling cliffs, reaching out to engulf the whole of that small island--and finally, sea triumphant, mockingly destroying the puny efforts of man to thwart it.

It is drama of men against the sea. The small Aran Islands off the Irish coast seem ever to be lost beneath the pounding waves. Yet on this rocky, soilless shore the Man of Aran grows potatoes, with the aid of seaweed. Fish also may be found in the sea as well as the oil of the shark, used to light his crude lamp. But the sea does not always yield its bounties without a struggle, sometimes so fierce that the Man is glad to return alive, without fish without even his boat which is dashed to pieces.

The power of the film is brought out in these struggles. After more than one hour of emotionally fighting the sea from a plush chair, your reviewer was left somewhat spent and breathless. Yet he enjoyed his fight with the shark, his fearful clinging to the small bear which spun around like a matchstick in a drain, and especially the sensation of rolling in on the tops of the foaming breakers.