COME LIVE WITH ME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 116, 12 September 1941, Page 16

COME LIVE WITH ME

(M.G.M.)

FTER seeing Hedy Lamarr in Boom Town and now in Come Live With Me, I am being driven to the conclusion that the

furore she created in Extase, in her pre-Hollywood days, was due less to acting ability than to other considerations. Maybe I do her an injustice. Her will-to-act may have succumbed to the inexorable pressure of Hollywood "grooming," but whatever may be. the cause, Director Clarence Brown does not seem to have been able to make her act in this latest sentimental comedy. She is very, very decorative, I grant you, but I am getting to the age when I want more than that. And I have the feeling that in Come Live With Me, James Stewart suffers from the samm sentiment. (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) With that reservation, and one or two others which I shall make presently, Come Live With Me presents quite a passable way of spending a stray evening. It is that comfortable, if uninspiring, sort of film at which one can sit in cosy certainty of the happy ending, and to the extent that such films are necessary now and then it is acceptable. But I have one or two other criticisms. James Stewart is still the country boy who makes good and there is no gainsaying that he is getting this type of part too often. Clarence Brown does make some attempt to be different by revealing his hero, in the opening scenes, as much more shabby, grubby, disillusioned, and down-at-heel than M.G.M.’s romantic leads usually are, and by making him wing straight back to the country once he has made good in town; but organically the plot is unoriginal in the nth degree. And I wish that some producer or director would take his courage in both hands and banish utterly and for ever the old aunties, grannies, and nannies who specialise in dishing out slabs of home-baked (and often halfbaked) philosophy to all and sundry, including the audience. Even the best of them are out of place in most of the films in which they appear-the only one I can call to mind at the moment who

was not was Maria Ouspenskaya in The Mortal Storm. Still, even with all these teservations, as I said, you are quite likely to enjoy Come Live With Me., There are some excellent individual scenes and they are well spread through the film. The lower highbrows will enjoy trying to recall’ the lines of Marlowe’s which Stewart skips over when reciting to the glamorous Hedy and, lest this should arouse a pricking of the thumbs in certain fireside critics, let me assure you that neither these nor the film itself overstep the bounds of propriety.