TOM, DICK AND HARRY
(RKO Radio).
BY my standards of entertainment, Tom, Dick, and Harry is a much better picture than Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I reviewed at
length last week, and The Little Foxes, which I review above, and therefore perhaps by your standards I should devote at least as much space to it as I did to them. But the length of a review is seldom any criterion of quality. Tom, Dick, and Harry is good because it is a trifle, an honest trifle, and to parody Mr. Shakespeare, nothing is easier than "to win us with honest trifles." The film has no message and little sense, but a great deal of gaiety, wit, and engaging inventjon. It is what they call a "director’s picture," which in this case simply means that the director hasn’t let his stars run the show but has infused them with his own mood of airy whimsicality and fitted them into a neat balance between fact and fantasy. The result is that he gets away with even such a preposterous piece of imagination as those bells which sound when the heroine is kissed by the right man. Ginger Rogers is, of course, the perfect choice for the telephone girl who lives (and sleeps) in a perpetual romantic haze-a girl who, as her young sister puts it perfectly, " gets more adolescent every day." And Burgess Meredith is a similarly good choice for one of her suitors-the untidy, eccentric, whimsical garage-mechanic. But it is still the director’s picture. The director, by the way, is Garson Kanin. One of Hollywood’s brighter young men, he has already given us a pretty fair sample of what he can do in Man to Remember, Bachelor Mother, and They Knew What They Wanted. Certainly a man to remember. All that Kanin has for story material here is the fact that the telephone girl — by coincidence which would — be fatuous outside this context-gets the chance to marry either a nice millionaire (Alan Marshall), a stolid hard-working (Continued on next page) -- |
FILM REVIEWS
(Continued from previous page) ear salesman (George Murphy), or the queer garage-mechanic, and she can't decide between them. But what Kanin does with that material is-I was going to say nobody’s business, but it is of course exactly Mr. Kanin’s business: and it should be your’s too if you are looking for a real night off.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19420306.2.31.1.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 141, 6 March 1942, Page 14
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399TOM, DICK AND HARRY New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 141, 6 March 1942, Page 14
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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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