THE FOUR FEATHERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 16, 13 October 1939, Page 33

THE FOUR FEATHERS

(London Films-United Artists) To-day, when a member of Parliament wants to make the sending of white feathers a penal offence and when the average pacifist, receiving one, would probably use it to clean his pipe, the theme of A. E. W. Mason’s " Four Feathers" seems curiously dated. Perhaps because of that the Korda film version makes all the better picture. Distance lends enchantment, particularly to such old, unhappy, far-off things as battles in the last century; and so it is easy for even the most sensitive soul to get a vicarious thrill out of watching the British square at Omdurman (in full colour), mowing down hordes of Dervishes and FuzzyWuzzies, and to forget that a spear through the neck was probably just as painful to the recipient as a piece of shrapnel. There may be brighter chapters in Britain’s imperial story than the Sudan campaign of 1898, but the screen has yet to show us anything more superbly spectacular than these scenes of desert warfare. Yet "The Four Feathers" is not notable solely for its blood and battle. The Hungarian Korda brothers, who have done more to put the far-flung corners of the Empire on the map than any other film producers alive, have on

this occasion shown more restraint than is their wont. And again the film is the better for it. True, the sahibs are still pukka and upper lips are still notably stiff, but the retired colonels fighting their battles over again among the fruit and port are just amiable old fossils who are meant to be laughed at; and the three soldiers who send white feathers to their brother-officer are presented as thoughtless slaves of a silly convention. As for the hero, who gets the white feathers and subsequently "redeems" them by acts of incredible daring, he is not really a very complex person. Though he is a sensitive fellow who prefers Shelley to the Manual of Arms, there is no suggestion that he objects to war on principle. He is merely afraid that he will prove a coward under fire. Rather than risk this, he resigns his commission when his regiment sails for the Sudan. When to the three white feathers from his disgusted messmates is added a fourth from his disillusioned fiancée and an extremely cold shoulder from his father-in-law-to-be, he goes in secret to the Sudan, disguises himself as a native and engages in fantastic deeds of heroism in order to regain his self-esteem and make his scoffers eat their words and their feathers. It is a measure of John Clements’s ability as an actor that he makes this character both understandable. and estimable when he might, in these changed times, have seemed just a freak. But the piéce-de-resistance of the show comes from Ralph Richardson, as Durrance, the soldier who goes sunblind in the desert and is rescued from the tightest of tight corners by the hero. (continued on next page)