LYDIA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 130, 19 December 1941, Page 16

LYDIA

"(United Artists)

O find, in some unobtrusive, unpretentious production, a first-class piece of cinema is for me one of the chief delights of picture-going. I don’t want to

go altogether »hakespearean and say that it is like finding your pearl in your foul oyster, because that wouldn’t be altogether fair to the film industry, but the delight of discovery is the same. Yet there is an obverse side to such enjoyment and, since action and reaction are generally equal and opposite, I must rate as one of my principal bétes noires the film that does not measure up to expectations. Lydia falls (rather heavily, I fear), into this class." I do not think that I habitually expect too much from films, but when one sees in the credits the names of Alexander and Vincent Korda, Merle Oberon, Julien Duvivier (the director), Ben Hecht, Edna May Oliver and Joseph Cotten (ex-Citizen Kane cast), one is entitled to expect something better than average. That Lydia is, if anything, below par is due more I think to faulty direction and a certain incoherence in the story than to the work of the cast, who seem to find the going heavy at times. : S Lydia’s story is that of a woman who has four loves in her life and remains a spinster. As a romantic girl she nearly elopes with a college footballer, she conceives a tender affection for a blind musician, who more than reciprocates, she has an affair with an attractive ‘but irresponsible and worthless stranger for whom, woman-like, she is willing to give up more ‘than for her more devoted admirers and (viva democracy!), she nearly marries the son of her grandmother’s butler. I suppose that could all be made into a very interesting story, but Messrs. Korda and Duvivier decided to use the device of emotion recollected in tranquillity. Lydia and three of her beaux are shown at the beginning of the film having a reunion — all of them septuagenarians, more or less — and the story is evoked by their reminiscences. Even that would be all very well were it not that every now and then there is a flash-back, or rather forward, from some scene of Miss Oberon’s youth to this reunion of the ancients, to enable the aged Miss Lydia to.make some caustic comment on her youthful follies. The effect of this technique, quite apart from the depressing reminder that wrinkles will one day deface even Miss Oberon’s fair flesh, is to break down what might have been a unified and integrated story into a series of episodes, held apart by far too many hiatusses, or hiati, or whatever they are. The ‘dialogue, too, is uneven. At times good, it occasionally falls into bathos through too much striving after effect. I am loath to blame this too much on Ben Hecht. I notice he had associated with him a Mr. Samuel Hoffenstein, who should, perhaps, take some of the kicks in exchange for his ha’pence. But though the film as a whole misfires badly, I don’t want to dismiss it

as altogether uninteresting. The photography is occasionally good-and slow motion is used very effectively in one sequence to portray a state of mind. Some of the scenes, too, in which Hans Yaray (a new face to me), plays piano pictures for a class of blind children, are excellent, and most of the other members of the cast have their moments. But there are not enough of such moments to make it a good picture, though I concede that to a limited audience, it would be interesting.