FEMALE CORRESPONDENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 132, 2 January 1942, Page 11

FEMALE CORRESPONDENT

(Columbia)

[Ts called Female Correspondent but it really isn’t much about a female correspondent at all. It’s the old, old story of the little tough guy who

makes good, and in the end becomes (presumably) President of the United States.

But it starts off with the female correspondent. This is Jane Scott (Virginia Bruce) and she’s wandering round the long, long corridors of the Capitol, Washington, carrying a portable mike with a long, long flex. And she buttonholes each senator as he comes out. of the Senate Chamber and tries to get him to say something for her session "Washington Whispers." But especially she wants to get something from Herbert Marshall (inadequately disguised as Senator John Coleridge) who’s chairman of a sub-committee to discuss the re-armament programme. But he isn’t talking---and even when he does he weighs his words so carefully you can see the scales. So her broadcasts are all rather anti-Coleridge, but you can guess that something’s going to happen in the end, Then in comes Marty Driscoe (Gene Reynolds). the little tough guy from the home town, whom carefully-correct Senator Coleridge has unwittingly sponsored as a Senate Page Boy. As all the other Senate Page Boys (it’s a great honour to be a Senate Page Boy) have had regular injections of Tradition from the age of two, Marty is rather conspicuous, but you can see the process of impregnation beginning (Dome of Capitol glimpsed through trees-"Gee, it’s beautiful"). Marty’s chief objection to being a S.P.B. is that he is expected to wear knickerbockers, but Herbert Marshall who is now converted to the gospel of "catch ’em rough and treat ’em young" assures him-rather incor-rectly-that only Senate Page Boys wear knickers. And Virginia Bruce and Herbert and Marty start getting around together, because she understands Marty and Herbert is beginning to want to understand her. It’s a bit tough that young Marty should be caught eavesdropping and that shortly afterwards a State Secret becomes Public Property. And very few people (only Herbert and Virginia in fact) believe him when he says he wouldn’t tell, he was only listening out of curiosity. So he gets Sent Down. And he is so annoyed at getting sent down unjustly that he goes and sells

a really whopping State Secret (he wasn’t really going to sell it-he just inspected the contents of the safe out of curiosity) to a frightful man called Conroy who’s the director of an aeroplane company. Meanwhile you see all the extra editions coming out-‘"Grave Charges against Senator Coleridge-Leakage of Vital Information"-and you realise that Senator Coleridge is likely to be Sent Down too. And. then Marty realises that he’s Betrayed his Benefactor but that it’s Too Late. Se he hitch-hikes back to confess all, and manages to burst into the committee toom at the Crucial Moment. So now everything is All Right, except that someone thinks that Marty should be ysent to prison, but Herbert demands that he be tried by his peers, i.e, the Senate Page Boys. So there’s an even more impressive scene than usual in the Senate Chamber (which, by the way, has changed since Mr. Smith went there) when the boys try Marty. And one of them makes a moving speech saying that Marty’s a friend of theirs so he must be All Right. So everyone cheers wildly but Marty holds up a hand for silence and makes an even more moving speech saying that he now knows the real me ining of the Constitution of the United States (in which he’s one up on the majority of U.S. lawyers and politicians) and he recites large portions of it quite impressively, considering that he has tears streaming down both cheeks and has obviously forgotten his hanky. And the director has forgotten something, too, because the picture ends there, and he has forgotten to clear up the Herbert Marshall-Virginia Bruce business. Halfway through she was calling him darling, but of course that doesn’t mean anything nowadays. But we can trust Herbert, who’s old enough _to look after himself even if he is least twenty years younger than all the other Senators. So we’re left with the moral, which is that a Nice Boy, even if he’s got the Right Stuff in him, can never have as much of the Right Stuff in him as the tough guy who gets on the level,