MOON OVER BURMA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 103, 13 June 1941, Page 16

MOON OVER BURMA

(Paramount)

00n OVER BURMA would, in my _ opinion, have been more like a total eclipse had it not been for one good actor and one or

two fairly good scenes. The -actor is Albert Basserman, and while I think he is wasted in such stuff as this, he certainly made it bearable. By contrast, Dorothy Lamour is inconspicuous-his-trionically, I mean, and she hasn't even a sarong to help things along. It’s the old, old story of one woman and two men Behind the Beyond-this time in Burma, though I wouldn’t have recognised it without the theme song. It didn’t look a bit like the pictures in the geographical magazines. There are two themes; one is, of. course, the ro-mance and the other the plotting of the badmen to bring about the ruin of the hero and his partners. This dirty work is frustrated in the nick of time by — well,

who could it be but little Dotty? She is a night club singer in Rangoon, rescued from the too pressing attentions of her manager by Robert Preston, one of three partners in a teak plantation. The others are Preston Foster and Albert Basserman (who is blind). Dotty arrives in the jungle with one suitcase, which evidently has the capacity of a goodsized cabin trunk if one is to judge by the number of costumes it produces for her during the remainder of the film. She decides that what the place wants is the touch of a woman’s hand, but her efforts aren’t too successful, and the sight of her tottering through the compound in six-inch heels and a sun-suit is rather too much for the natives. However, all is well in the end, as you may suppose. Basserman, as the blind man, is the only outstanding member of the cast, and he has one good fight in the dark and armed only with a_ stock-whip, against the principal villain. I enjoyed that, but on the whole I found the film tedious; it whiled away about an hour and a-half and seemed a little longer..