THE GIRL IN THE NEWS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 151, 15 May 1942, Page 14

THE GIRL IN THE NEWS

(M.G.M. British)

HEN war broke out, there were many of us who expressed the not unnatural view that it would mean an.

other grave set-back to the British film industry, and that Hollywood might"as a result be finally entrenched in an unchallengeable Pposition, Without wanting to argue that the war is a Good Thing or a blessing in disguise to the British studios, I am not sO sure now that we were right. Several recent British films-for example, Pimpernel Smith, The Farmer’s Wite, Quiet Wedding, Major Barbara, and now The Girl in the News-suggest that the war has had a cathartic effect on the industry, has purged it of some of the ills from which it was suffering and which, incidentally, still afflict Hollywood to some extent. For one thing, the surfeit of minor producing companies, which resulted in a rush of low grade " quickies " (particularly those awful musical-comedies) to supply the requirements of the pernicious Quota System, has now been removed, and only a comparatively few studios remain in active Production. (An echo of those old days of multitudinous overlapping enterprises is perhaps to be found in the fact that The Girl in the News is described as a Twentieth Century Feature, produced by Gaumont British and released by M.G.M.). Forced by the war to limit quantity, British producers in general have made an improvement in quality. It might almost be said that they are taking their job more seriously. Without having become pre-occupied with war themes, and without having forgotten that entertainment is still their main purpose, they are choosing their subjectmatter more carefully, and are making the best use of their available manpower and resources, I have cited The Girl in the News @s an example, and it is a good one. The story is the first consideration, direction

is the second, and the performances of a first-rate cast fit neatly into the pattern of the plot. The drama (a murder conspiracy) develops in a court-room atmosphere and includes two of those trial sequences in which British films nearly

always excel. Perhaps this is true only of British audiences, but somehow the dispassionate procedure of a British court of justice, with its solemnity of wigs, gowns, and legal language, seems to heighten the underlying tension of the human emotions involved far more than a similar scene in an American setting, where the drama is much more on the surface. oo

However, even with two sessions of the Assizes in the one picture, the director, Carol Reed, has not given us too much of a good thing. His choice of detail to provide local colour and build up suspense is just as clever in the opening scenes where a neurotic invalid accidentally dies of poisoning and later in those where another invalid is murdered, as it is in those scenes in which Nurse Graham (Margaret Lockwood) twice faces a jury as a result of these deaths. In both cases she is, of course, innocent and is acquitted in the first without much exertion on the part of her counsel (Barry K. Barnes). But when the nurse is involved in a second poisoning case, in exactly similar circumstances and for apparently similar motives, it requires a daring bluff by counsel to reveal that she is the victim of a diabolically clever conspiracy, the real murderers having used the first charge against her to make it almost impossible for her to escape the second. When I mention that Emlyn Williams portrays one of the villains of the piece and that he is at his villainous best, you may have an even better idea of the quality of this exciting and worthwhile film.