BLOSSOMS IN THE DUST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 179, 27 November 1942, Page 13

BLOSSOMS IN THE DUST

(M-G-M)

S the Elizabethan epitaphist remarked, "Only the Actions of the Just Smell sweet and blossom in the Dust."

but it is the actions of the unjust which provide the raison d’etre for all the little blossoms rescued, rather chaningly, from the dust by Greer Garson’s Edna Gladney. Mrs. Gladney, as we are now aware, was the founder of the Forth Worth Children’s Home and Aid Society, and laboured

hard throughout her, life to better the lot of the orphans and the fatherless. The dedication announces that the film is a true account (we suspect a highly technicoloured one), of Mrs. Gladney’s life and work, and it also records the fact that Mrs. Gladney, aged 58, is still alive at Forth Worth, Texas. From this latter fact we conclude that Mrs. Gladney was, and is, a woman of remarkable endurance. Only thus could she have undergone a life as full of toil and tragedy as that depicted by Miss Garson and remained alive to witness M.G.M.’s telling of the tale. For Miss Garson’s life is thickly peppered with tragedies. First there is the suicide of her foster-sister. Then Miss Garson’s marriage to the Texas flour-miller, Samuel Gladney (Walter

Pidgeon), is followed by the death of their only child, and shortly after this Ajust another 500 feet), comes financial ruin and the death of Samuel. But inspired by his example, Miss Garson carries on her noble work, which involves not only constant attendance orphans and prospective foster-parents, but also frequent journeys to the Texas Senate to coin such epigrams as "There are no illegitimate children, only Wlegitimate parents," and (when accused of encouraging bad girls to have babies), "Bad girls don’t have babies." So we come at last to a lonely Christmas Eve when Miss Garson, suffering from a surfeit of sacrifice, decides to go back to her girlhood home taking with, her the only: little orphan she ever loved. But inopportunely, two eager foster-parents arrive on the doorstep, and driven to make the Supreme Sacrifice by the photo of Samuel and the chidings of. Family Friend Felix Bressart, she hands over little Tony and starts afresh with two less desirable specimens of orphanhood. With this final tragedy, the film finishes, but the evidence is that the noble Mrs. Gladney was driven on from sacrifice to sacrifice, and is probably being sacrificial still. Yet, in many respects, the film is not as difficult to sit through as might be expected — nor quite as tearful. Miss Garson shines red gold and admirably throughout, and though baby motif is of course inseparable from the theme, it is used with relative restraint, and the infants, instead of being rosily. ex-. uberant in the Rubens manner, are petite and winsome, and all done in a pale apricot shade. But as we left the. theatre we felt, like Gilbert’s Pirate King, something of the impatience of one, who had known: only too orphan what it is like to: be one.