“JOURNEY FOR MARGARET”

Dominion, Volume 37, Issue 199, 20 May 1944, Page 8

“JOURNEY FOR MARGARET”

If there is any royal road to box-offiee success it is to secure a little sad-eyed moppet and plant her squarely in a Loudon blitz story. Messrs. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer have done just that with Margaret O’Brien; a surprisingly talented ffve-year-old who raised “Journey for Margaret (Paramount) to an honoured place among the worthwhile films of the past year. The story was written by W. I*. White, whose father, the famous Emporian (Kansas) editor, whose opinions influenced the whole country, recently died. Young White wrote a touching story of an American newspaper correspondent who watched bitterly events which gave Franco his money’s worth in Spain, allowed Mussolini to overrun Abyssinia and Albania, brought Hitler to the very front door of Britain. In the early days of the blitz he was back in London, prepared to give up his work as a war correspondent and return to journalistic obscurity. He writes a last “human interest" story of an improvised home for the care of London’s blitz orphans. In writing it he sees a rebirth of hope and courage; he finds brown-eyed Margaret O’Bricp (for the book has now become the picture), and he takes her back to the United States with him as a symbol of a life that must go on and rise from the wreckage of the early 1940’5.. Robert Young is sincere and convincing as the correspondent; Laraine Day less interesting as his wife. But the plum of the piece is young Margaret, whose tyork in this film has won her a big contract in Hollywood. Let us hong that it is not the intentions of the moguls there to turn her Into another singing and dancing Shirley Temple. “Calling Dr. Gillespie,” the best of the new Gillespie series, is also on the programme. Lionel Barrymore, who never changes one iota from one film to the next. Is co-starred with Philip Dorn (lately on the Wellington screen in “Random Harvest”) and Donna Reed. Altogether, the Paramount this week is presenting a programme that is as neatly balanced as two packets of candy.