Good, Clean Fun

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 139, 20 February 1942, Page 5

Good, Clean Fun

FORTY years ago was the heyday of the "straight" musical comedy, like The Geisha, Floradora, The. Messenger Boy and the rest of them. At a performance of The Country Girl, the star comedian, I remember, was George Lauri, and as a strongminded female he made an impassioned appeal to his fellow-women to revolt against the tyranny of man, the enemy. Across the years, when many more improving homilies have become a total loss, floats that speech, miraculously preserved: . "Strike for freedom, my sisters, and when you strike, have something in your hand, if it’s only the fender. Whatdoes a man marry a woman for? Why, to sew on his buttons! And what I say to you, my sisters, is this: ‘Don’t sew on his buttons! Let him go without buttons, and then down will come his dignity and independence.’" Not very subtle, I suppose. But cheerful, clean vulgarity is a better tonic than cynical suggestiveness. Like Kipling’s three-decker novel, it had the merit of "taking tired people to the Islands of the Blest."-("Plays and Players Long Ago." Miss Cecil Hull, 1YA, January 26). Japan Unmasked You have seen Hallett Abend, American newspaperman, quoted since the war with Japan started. Here is his last pre-war book about an area which he had studied for many years as one of the shrewdest of the Far Eastern correspondents: Japan Unmasked. This book is an intensely valuable commentary upon Japan’s aims and limitations in the Pacific. war, and upon the countries-mainly island territories-which are now in jeopardy. Not all of the author’s predictions have proved soundsome of them are grimly and ironically contradicted

by very recent events. He declares, for example, that Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, is one of the few naval bases in the world the value of which has not been sharply reduced by air war. He found Hawaii, when he was last there only a few months ago-well, eight or nine months, I think it would have been-pre-paring hurriedly but systematically for any eventuality, "ready to fight anybody or everybody at the earliest possible date." This conclusion has scarcely been borne out, at least as to readiness; but Mr. Abend’s reasoned and factual evaluation of the importance of Hawaii in a Pacific war can stand.(Book talk by John Moffett. 4YA, January 23),