TALK OF THE TOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 191, 19 February 1943, Page 8

TALK OF THE TOWN

(Columbia)

HEN I saw this film I had just read Mission to Moscow, by Joseph Davies, in which the Ambassador, as

you may snow, jays sire emphasis on the contrast between the American and Russian systems of justice, pointing out all the safeguards to the citizen in the former, and the guarantees that he will receive a fair trial. Like many another Hollywood story, Talk of the Town rather seems to give the lie to Ambassador Davies. The very fact that American justice can be treated with such dramatic licence by Americans may indeed be a proof of its basic soundness, but in this film it takes 118 minutes of nerve-wracking suspense and danger to convince Leopold Dilg (Cary Grant) that there isn’t one law for the rich and another for labour agitators. It is, however, not nearly as nervewracking for the audience as it is for Leopold Dilg, thanks to Ronald Colman, Jean Arthur, Cary Grant himself, and the light touch of the director, George Stevens. For in spite of its melodramatic man-hunt theme and its occasjonal purple patches of oratory, this is authentically a comedy-one of the few bright spots in the present drab pattern of film entertainment. Though Cary Grant as Dilg, the fugitive from corrupt justice, is the mainspring of the plot, most of the interest centres round Ronald Colman as Professor Lightcap, the eminent legal authority-not quite the romantic, swashbuckling Colman to whom we are accustomed, but a bearded pedant whom Mr, Roosevelt has picked to become a judge of the U.S. Supreme Court by the end of the picture. Dilg represents the harsh facts of the law, Professor Lightcap the theory. And when Dilg, whose only crime is that he has’ made speeches on street corners, but who is wanted on faked charges of arson and murder, takes refuge in Lightcap’s house, it is the effort to make the professor reconcile theory with fact and to enlist his active aid in saving Dilg that supplies the story with most of its action. Jean Arthur comes into it most successfully as the girl who has rented her home to Lightcap for the summer and who can’t make up her mind whether she is sorry for the fugitive and in love with the professor or sorry for the professor and in love with the fugitive. Before Justice eventually triumphs (in fact perhaps more than in theory) and before the Professor takes his seat on the Supreme Court Bench and the girl finally makes up her mind, Dilg has to face a lynching mob and the professor has to shave off his beard and take the law into his own hands. Then, with rather too many well-chosen words, he makes the mob ashamed of its violence and proud again of its legal system, and the director is left to wind up the love-story as best he can. What he does with it doesn’t much matter, but what he does with the comedy situations throughout should be a lesson to many of his Hollywood colleagues in the truth that a serious subject can be legitimately treated with humour,

[To be coldly judicial, the melodrama at the end of the film does perhaps get in the way of a tip-top grading, but our little man has a.confession to make. He saw the picture at a screening following an exhibitors’ conference, and there were cigars and whisky. Well now, whisky, these days! Our little man, like Prof. Lightcap, is only human: someétimes he awards the benefit of the doubt. It would be ungenerous, he insisted, not to stand up to applaud. So there you are.]