ADAM HAD FOUR SONS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 110, 1 August 1941, Page 21

ADAM HAD FOUR SONS

(Columbia)

DAM (Warner Baxter) not only had four sons, but also a .wife, a young Continental governess, a large house, a fat bank account. and several cars.

For myself, I'd be willing to settle for the governess. She is Ingrid Bergman, the Swedish actress who made her debut about a year ago opposite Leslie Howard in Intermezzo and hasn’t been seen since. Why Hollywood has neglected her in the meantime I can’t understand, because she has intelligence as well as good looks, and there is an intensity in her acting which gives interest to the most stiltedly melodramatic situations (of which there are a good number in this picture). As for Adam, it takes him much more than a year to become fully aware of Miss Bergman’s qualities; it takes him, in fact, from just before the stock market crash on Wall Street in 1907 until just after Great War 1. In the meantime he has lost his worldly goods (but regains them thanks to the war boom), and his wife, and has had a packet of trouble from his sons. Except for one brief period when she is sent back to the Continent while Adam reconquers Wall Street, the governess remains throughout these trying times (they are also rather trying for the audience) as a benign influence in the family, acting as a kind. of shock-absorber between Adam and adversity. Chief serpent in Adam’s garden is Susan Hayward who, as the wife of one of his sons, is responsible for at least half the grey hairs which appear in Warner Baxter’s makeup toward the end of the picture. She makes nasty mischief between the brothers, plots to oust the governess from the garden. But in the end it is the governess who shows the serpent the exit. Enlivened though it occasionally is by the minxing of Susan Hayward, Adam Had Four Sons would be a very dreary family chronicle were it not for the personality of Ingrid Bergman,