IRENE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 72, 8 November 1940, Page 17

IRENE

(RKO) Hollywood, questing desperately after something new, is always turning up with @ surprise. Mickey Rooney, we find (not that it comes under the heading of laudable achievements), can both sing and play a complicated set of drums, Garbo turns comedienne, John Barrymore satirises himself. "Irene" is also a surprise. Anna Neagle, whom we’d come to link with Queen Victoria just as inevitably as we link George Arliss with Disraeli, demonstrates that she can dance, sing, flirt, and wear décolleté gowns with the youngest and most seductive of Hollywood’s chorines. The truth is Anna Neagle did start off as a chorus girl and worked up to Queen Victoria after years of patient coaching by Herbert Wilcox. In eight years Wilcox and Anna Neagle have made 14 pictures together, among them "Victoria the Great,’ "Sixty Glorious Years" (second Victorian impersonation), and "Nurse Edith Cavell." On the way, when Wilcox decided to rejuvenate Miss Neagle, was "Queen of Destiny" (third Victorian impersonation). "Irene" is James Montgomery’s stage show, jazzed up a little and with the whiskers brushed off. It is the story of how a little sales girl dances her way into the heart of a young millionaire (Ray Milland), who, just to make a job for his discovery, buys a_ controlling interest in an exclusive dress salon. There’s really little else to the tale — just a series of simple misunderstandings and mishaps that never look like ending anywhere else but in an embrace, But for all its naivete, "Irene" has a lilting, lyric quality, and is as happy and carefree as Irene herself. After so much Victorianism it’s pleasant to be reminded that Anna Neagle has nice legs, a pretty figure, and, as a sudden blob of technicolor reveals, startlingly red hair. The technicolor, by the way, is interesting. We are sailing along pleasantly in black and white when, presto, we’re knocked in the eye with a thousand feet of technicolor. And when Miss Neagle’s red hair and Alice Blue Gown have been dis-

played sufficiently, we melt back into black and white. It might have been an unpleasant disruption, but Mr. Wilcox has managed it expertly. To me the only discordant note was a red hot version of the "Alice Blue Gown" song, violently swung by a Harlem revue, complete with a choco-late-coloured mammy weighing two or three hundredweight and shaking like a blancmange. In case you’re interested-and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be-the cast includes, besides Ray Milland, Billie Burke, May Robson, Alan Marshall, and Roland Young.