MANPOWER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 182, 18 December 1942, Page 17

MANPOWER

(Warner Rrac )

ee, "tae ae oy ON’T imagine from the title of Manpower that it’ has anything to do 'with New: Zealand’s Problem of the Hour, nor

even anything to do with. war, except perhaps the domestic war which Einstein says that every man must wage. If there is any shortage, it is not of man -but of woman-power, for here we have Edward G. Robinson and George Raft as two close friends who are emergency repair-men in a Power and Light Company, and there is only Marlene Dietrich to share between them. It is obvious that there will be a shortcircuit in their friendship, followed by

violent explosions, when she marries the unglamorous: Mr. Robinson, but. falls in love with the more magnetic Mr. Raft. This fierce emotional storm is .worked out in an, equally eruptive setting of natural disturbances, amid sheets of rain, hail, and lighting, with the Power and Light employees climbing huge pylons and braving electric shocks to mend damaged high-tension cables. There is, however, if you will excuse the pun, rather a tendency to pylon the agony; and though the general effect of the film is raw and rowdy (as befits its theme), and the pace of the direction is terrifie and’ the detail excellent, the incidental moods of the story are curiously mixed. For nearly every sequence of serious melodrama, there is an interlude of sheer slapstick, in which actors like Alan Hale and Frank McHugh clown with the brakes off. And it is a pity that so much high-pressure wit in the dialogue should be wasted just because nearly all the players talk too loud and too fast for you to hear them.