SHINING VICTORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 199, 16 April 1943, Page 13

SHINING VICTORY

; (Warner Bros.)

HIS film provides a useful follow-up to last week’s discussion about Mrs. Hadley and her "phoneyness," because there is a sense in

which Shining Victory represents a shining example of victory over the Hollywood conventions that were so apparent in the other film. Shining Victory (from the play Jupiter Laughs by Dr. A. J. Cronin), has as its hero an embittered, mature doctor-scientist, who treats his colleagues and patients not as human beings but as machines or guinea-pigs. This is perhaps not unusual in a Cronin doctor, but it is unusual for Hollywood, which regards the bedside manner as being highly important at the box-office, and therefore strongly favours the Young Dr. Kildare type of medico. Again, although films which are bold enough to kill off their heroines are by no means unknown, they are still rare enough to be worth comment. These are the two outstanding respects in which Shining Victory disregards cinema tradition, but there are a good many other less obvious signs that the director (Irving Rapper), still has a mind of his own. Lunatics and mental asylums scarcely lend themselves to frivolous entertainment, but they can make strong» drama, and Rapper has preferred to be realistic rather than diverting. All this, of course, must be rather upsetting \to _ those members of the audience who like their drama to be true to Hollywood rather than true to life. I was interested (and maliciously delighted), to overhear the comments of two women behind me who agreed that the whole thing was "absolutely spoiled" because the heroine ‘had died. But even more illuminating. was the reaction of a girl aged about 12obviously an experienced picturegoerwho came out of the theatre just ahead of me muttering, with concentrated venom, "I hope he got killed, I hope he got killed" — meaning the doctor-hero, who, in the final scene, is shown leaving for China on a dangerous medical mission. "Why do you hope that?" I heard her mother ask. "Because he was such a beast!" replied the disillusioned young lady. (1 wonder how many Dr. Kildare pictures she had seen to get like that? A better example of Hollywoodconditioning of the emotional reflexes could hardly be imagined). There is another reason why some of those who see Shining Victory may feel disillusioned, and even cheated, for the posters and advertisements blatantly exploit a type of cheap sensationalism that the film itself does nothing to justify. If you took the publicity seriously, you would expect to see intimate medical mysteries revealed in a story that is all about the awful effects on women of not having husbands, causing them to suffer from morbid fancies and disturbed sleep. Bunkum! While it is true that one of the characters is a love; sick attendant at the sanatorium (Barbara O'Neill), who loses her mental balance and precipitates a tragedy, she is only a subsidiary character, and her

neurosis is quite incidental to the plot, which principally concerns the struggle by the doctor-hero (James Stephenson), to perfect a serum for mental disorders, and the part played by his pretty assistant (Geraldine Fitzgerald) in keeping him human. This theme is embroidered by intelligent direction,. much-better-than-average dialogue, and some excellent acting by "the stars and by such supporting stalwarts as Donald Crisp and Montagu Love. Stephenson (who supplied almost the only paragraph worth reading in The Letter), should now, I understand from News Review, be referred to as " the late James Stephenson." I do not know the cireumstances of his death-but evidently the 12-year-old mentioned above has got her wish.