THEY DARE NOT LOVE
(Columbia)
*VE seen some silly and misleading film titles in my time, but I think this one just about takes the Hollywood bun. Who said they dare not love? Why,
they get married and have an ocean voyage honeymoon! But that isn’t the point. From such a title as They Dare Not Love you might reasonably expect (a) eugenics, (b) eternal triangle, (c) something Freudian. You would hardly expect a story about an exiled Austrian prince versus the Nazis. George Brent is the Prince Kurt von Rotenberg (for which presumably read Habsburg) who escapes from the ansch-
luss by the braid on his epaulets, goes to America and becomes a playboy, and then decides to return to Austria to redeem his manhood and save, if possible, his imprisoned friends. And here let me interpolate a question: why did they have to choose such an obvious American as George Brent to play the prince, when they took the trouble to fill in most of the other parts with such very satisfactory foreign players (particularly Paul Lukas as the sinister Gestapo agent)? Anyone less like a blue-blooded or even plain red-blooded Continental I can hardly imagine. The girl he dare not love, but does fairly successfully, is Martha Scott. She portrays the fragile Austrian who escapes from Hitler in the prince’s company and who thereafter inspires him to stand up to the Nazis. Their honeymoon on a Hamburg-bound Belgian ship taken over by the Germans for the express purpose of catching the prince reminded me strongly, with its atmosphere of impending doom, of the famous One-Way Passage, and its revived version, ’Til We Meet Again. Fortunately, this particular brand of doom jis averted by the convenient intervention of a_ British destroyer on the first day of war, and the lovers cheerfully face the prospect of internment in England for the duration.
Since I’ve mentioned some of its faults, let me make plain in conclusion that I quite enjoyed They Dare Not Love — mainly because it wasn’t what it threatened to be and because the general theme was at least tdpical. But they dare not love, forsooth!
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19410912.2.34.1.4
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 116, 12 September 1941, Page 17
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358THEY DARE NOT LOVE New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 116, 12 September 1941, Page 17
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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