SEVEN SINNERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 92, 28 March 1941, Page 17

SEVEN SINNERS

(Universal)

EVERAL Hollywood directors are apparently under the impression at the moment that they can make good pictures by smashing furniture; the more

furniture broken up the better the picture. According to this theory also, the ideal place for wrecking operations is a hotel bar, where there are always plenty of bottles to break as well as tables and chairs. By such specifications Seven Sinners should be reckoned a highly successful picture since, according to the studio’s own figures, Director Tay Garnett spent no less than 19,580 dollars of Universal’s money to defray the cost of the two miniature Armageddons with

which the picture begins and ends. To make everything just right, both these holocausts take place in saloons. Chiefly responsible for all this destruction is Marlene Dietrich, She started the current fashion for bar-room fights in that excellent Western, Destry Rides Again. Now, in Seven Sinners, she turns East and becomes the chief incitement to violence among the islands of the Dutch Indies. Her name is Bijou and she is, among other things, a cafe singer. Those who did not see Destry and who remember Miss Dietrich only as a drowsy enchantress whose pictures were as slow as her speech, will probably be surprised at the way things move when she begins making eyes at officers and men of the U.S. Navy*who are visiting the place, and when certain of the local inhabitants object. When her languorous glance comes to rest fondly and firmly on a dashing young lieutenant with a promising career (John Wayne), and he -responds, the objections are centred in a dangerously phlegmatic Dutchman (Oscar Homolka), who regards Bijou as his private property, and the captain of the flagship (Reginald Denny), who hates to see a promising officer throw up his career for a woman so notorious that there are hardly any islands left for her to be deported to. Bijou, of course, finally makes the gesture of renunciation which we picturegoers expect of women in her position, but the fight which precedes this aoble act is some compensa-tion-at least for the audience. It is just as well that it is, for there is not much else from the viewpoint of plot. There are, however, some enjoyably tough characterisations, particularly by Mischa Auer and Broderick Crawford, who act as Bijou’s bodyguards during her tour of the Indies. And Miss Dietrich herself has a way with her.