PARIS CALLING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 158, 3 July 1942, Page 16

PARIS CALLING

| (Universal)

‘THIS is Elizabeth Bergner’s first Hollywood film, and while I certainly cannot feel half as strongly about it as I did about Garbo’s Two-Faced Woman, it

did give me the same sort of impression that Hollywood has very little idea of how to make even a second-best use of its advantages. Miss Bergner is a most unusual and in many ways difficult actress; her strongly individual personality demands stories carefully selected or tailored to fit her gaminerie, her curious tragi-comic blend of childlike innocence and adult sophistication. | Only in rare moments does Paris Calling provide her with anything of the sort. It is a story in which almost any actress could star, and many have-an-other of those pseudo-realistic fairy tales which convince me more and more that Hollywood still regards the war mainly as an excuse to flood the screen with melodramatic fiction about International Ladies, Sinister Spy-Rings, Secret Ciphers (and, of course, Treaties), Well-Informed Quarters, and Love ver-

sus Patriotism. It’s the "Boys’, Own Paper" mentality, or its American equivalent. And maybe this is the alley down which the public wants to escape. Yet I’m inclined to doubt it, especially now that the war is on our very doorstep, in our homes, our factories, our camps, our daily lives. For every International Lady or Secret Agent there are a million worried housewives, a million ordinary men in private’s uniform or dungarees. Here is the stuff of real drama. Why not use it in some films? The trouble with a film like Paris Calling is that it builds its dream castles on such an arresting basis of fact that it is often not easy to detect the concrete from the gossamer, and this is one of the reasons, I imagine, why spy mania can so easily develop. After all, when nearly all your war films have a Fifth Columnist in the foreground, it is perhaps hardly surprising if you begin to suspect your neighbour because you have discovered that he is fond of Wagner and Beethoven, An obsession with codes,

according to The Times correspondent on Tobruk, may even help you to lose battles. In this, particular case we have a story about the fall of France and the resistance to the conquerors of a large section of the inhabitants. Now there is a theme for real drama if you like, but having keyed the plot to a factual background. of. human suffering and. courage, the producers then soar upward into the realm of lurid melodrama, with a heroine who comes from one of the Best Families of France, who is engaged to a suave but obviously despicable Vichy politician, but who loves a Yank in the R.A.F. left behind when the British evacuated. the country (sad to relate he got drunk and wasn’t called in time next morning), and who works for Free France and Colonel Britton by broadcasting code messages from a secret radio station. She plays the piano in a café under the very helmets of the Gestapo, but by twiddling around on the B flat below middle C she gets the information out-an ingenious device for which Free France and Universal Films are indebted to International Lady. But her biggest achievement is in discovering the terms of the Secret Treaty which her fiancé, the suave but Vichious Basil Rathbone, is about to conclude with Hitler, and carries meanwhile next to his skin. She secures the Documents by the simple process of shooting her fiancé in the back as he ardently gathers her into his arms. Since I have already acquired the reputation of being tenderhearted, I think I’ll add to it by saying that this struck me as a particularly dirty trick, however patriotic. Meantime the Yank who was in the R.A.F. is in trouble with the Gestapo, but by a most fortunate coincidence his jailer happens to be a young Nazi whom he had befriended. By another fortunate coincidence, R.A.F. headquarters in England are in possession of a German seaplane which they captured at Narvik, and this enables a British party to land unobserved right outside the secret radio station and res-

cue-or capture-everybody who really matters. As a routine thriller, Paris Calling is good enough, but is Hollywood so bankrupt of ideas that this is the best it can do both with an actress of Bergner’s rare quality and the theme of. stricken France?