THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 96, 24 April 1941, Page 51

THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED

(R.K.O. Radio)

HE _ Hollywood _ studios ’ "have frequently been criticised for their bankruptcy of ideas, They Knew What They Wanted, which has been made

three times, is one of the few valid arguments I have encountered for the claim that a good story is worth telling again. In this case the story does not matter so much; the telling, however, is a most sincere piece of cinema art. I found it praiseworthy on four counts -the performances of Charles Laughton, Carole Lombard, and William Gargan, and the direction of Garson Kanin, one of the youngest directors making better-grade pictures and one who, to adapt the title of this film, knows what he wants. Tony Patucci (Charles Laughton) is a porky, shy, jelly Italian winegrower in a Californian valley. On a jaunt to San Francisco he falls dumbly in love with a rafferty blonde waitress (Carole Lombard) whom he proceeds to woo laboriously by correspondence. She accepts him, comes to his fruit ranch and meets disaster in the quickly fatal attractions of Tony Patucci’s ranch foreman (William Gargan). Mr. Kanin then leads us swiftly to the emotional climax of the film, the sad personal problem of Tony Patucci, who is eventually big enough to decide that even if she is about to have another man’s child, he wants his waitress wife, Dominating the story is the brilliant acting of Laughton, who, in an exacting part, is more Patucci and less Laughton than one could credit him with becoming. Done up in a moustache and an Italian accent, he gambols through some delightful comedy as the diffident

bridegroom, then, as the wrathful cuckold, plumbs some raw and nearly unbearable emotional depths. The scene in which the heart-torn little Italian strikes his unresisting rival is strong meat — as strong as the average picturegoer can digest. William Gargan, as the uncontrollably romantic ranch foreman. plays the cad with masochistic relish. Carole Lombard, stripped of almost the last shred of conventional Hollywood glamour, invests the waitress with an authentic whiff of stale soup, As you can see, They Knew What They Wanted is far from being epic in the grandeur of its story or the scope of its conflicts. It is purely personal drama, but, in the very intensity of its personal emotions, it comes very close to fulfilling the traditional function of drama, which is to purge the heart with pity and with terror.