UNFINISHED BUSINESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 125, 14 November 1941, Page 16

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

(Universal)

ACCORDING to Nancy Evans (Irene Dunne), the life of every woman contains a piece of unfinished business.

and until she can get it tidied up, she isn’t likely to be happy. In her case, it was a blitzkrieg romance with a rich philanderer (Preston Foster), who kissed her passionately two or three times when, as an innocent country girl, she travelled by train to New

York. At the station he politely raised his hat and disappeared. Without wishing to doubt the lady’s account of the incident, one must comment that two or three kisses on a train are hardly enough to justify all the frustration and inhibition and heartbreak that go to make up the*rest of this story. Rather conveniently, Nancy manages to get herself married to the philanderer’s nice brother (Robert Montgomery), but then she insists on making both their lives miserable by trying to tie up the loose ends of the railroad romance. Not until he has joined the army in disgust, and she has had a baby in secret, is she able to make her husband understand the peculiar significance of her mental attitude. She is more successful with him than she was with me: it was all a bit too psychological and subtle for this dimwitted critic. However, Unfinished Business is by no means without merit, not in its theme so much as in its incidentals. Much of the by-play is really amusing, as when the heroine, with ambitions to be an.opera singer, finds the only outlet for her talent in singing birthday greetings ad nauseam over the telephone. And the film does admirably illustrate ,. Sue. Yo. SNe wee ea" Ue a

sew MAwia SS Special Nappy Knack being able to. introduce subsidiary characters who wander on to the screen and.then wander off again, having contributed little to the actual development of the plot, but a great deal to the entertainment. For instance, I have just as clear impressions of three unimportant people-Walter Catlett, the nightclub impresario who hires the heroine as his lyrical ‘phone girl, Eugene Pallette, the butler with squeaky boots and a perpetual grievance, and the unknown actress who plays Montgomery’s aunt-as I have of the two principals. For this and one or two other examples of imaginative direction, I pay tribute to Gregory La Cava, but he is guilty of at least one howling cliché-the baby in the final scene. Why not a black cat instead? Now, that would really have "meant something, as you'll doubtless realise if you’ve seen the picture. But my main complaint is that the whole jolly business-and it often is jolly-is such an unconscionable time a’ finishing.