“We Are Not Alone”

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21187, 9 August 1940, Page 8

“ We Are Not Alone ”

A very gloomy story but one which has intimate characterisation, dramatic force and is notable for the brilliance of the acting of Jane Bryan as a penniless Austrian danseuse who is taken on as a governess to hli small boy by a small town country doctor in Britain. It is a remarkably able piece of acting and it is largely on her performance that the interest is held. Paul Muni as the country doctor whose wife is wholly unsympathetic and whose child suffers from nervous repression owing to his mother's harshness, is apt to be theatrical. He seems to have modelled his characterisation on Donat’s “Mr Chips,” or it may be that James Hilton has drawn a similar character in both his books. But in spite of what must be labelled “trick” acting, Muni succeeds in being convincing enough and sympathetic. Flora Robson is stern and forbidding as the wife, and Raymond Severn natural as the sensitive, repressed child. Una O’Connor scores as an old servant who has no use for the “foreign” governess and helps to send her to her death. The period of the picture is set at the opening of the last war and this leads to the title which the theme expounds. When they die they are not alone in death.