WE WERE DANCING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 170, 25 September 1942, Page 17

WE WERE DANCING

(M.G.M.)

SOMETIMES wonder these days if Hollywood, like the legendary creature which devoured its own young,

is bent on self-destruction. Not content with having sabotaged Greta Garbo in Two-faced Woman, M.G.M. now appear to be doing their best to squander another of their greatest assets, Norma Shearer. This suggestion may be far-fetched, but it is a stupid, wanton waste to put Miss Shearer into such a shallow and futile film as We Were Dancing for her first appearance on the screen after a year’s absence. I don’t mind her new hair-style, I don’t greatly object to her being used as a clotheshorse for Adrian’s latest and most expensive creations, but I do think she deserves something better than having Melvyn Douglas make embarrassing love to her in a divorce court sequence that is even more fatuous than the average. And she certainly is worthy of a better plot than this travesty of a sketch from Noel Coward’s To-night at Eight, which presents her and Melvyn Douglas as two penniless European aristocrats in the U.S.A. He. is a Viennese baron who makes a living as a professional weekend guest and gambler ("A moth who nests in the wardrobes of the rich"), and she is a Polish princess who is looking for a millionaire husband. You have to take the film’s word for it that they are Polish and Viennese — apart from the fact that Miss Shearer occasionally turns temperamental and makes foreignsounding noises you'd hardly guess. Amid a welter of ballrooms, sable and mink coats, country houses that resemble miniature Taj Mahals, twin beds and double beds, people with names like Tyler-Blane and Bryce-Carew, and phoney dialogue, they fall in love at first sight, get married, get jealous, get divorced. get married again. In its effort to reach a foregone conclusion the story behaves like a dog chasing its tailand becoming very tired in the process. The Noel Coward influence is fairly strong, and I for one came to the conclusion some time ago that Mr. Coward has ceased to have much relevance to this day and age, but it is a pity that Hollywood has not yet discovered that this is 1942 and that so far as most of us are concerned, films like We Were Dancing are speaking a dead language. In some ways it would be a good thing if the shortage of raw film became as acute as the shortage of raw rubber, then we might get some better pictures.