A YANK AT ETON

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 208, 18 June 1943, Page 13

A YANK AT ETON

(M.G.M.)

GOOD many people may have suspected that the English public school system and particularly its most famous

manifestation, Eton, are a bft of | a joke, but it takes Mickey Rooney to put the matter beyond doubt. Whatever may be the virtues of the system-and even its fiercest opponents will give it credit for some-they fail to appear in A Yank at Eton. What does appear is a conglomeration of burlesque, sentimentality, and rough-house comedy that may amuse but will hardly edify. When the most glaringly American young man on the screen goes to the most painfully English of institutions, he is at first full of healthy revolt against the snobbery, bullying and hide-bound conventions that he encounters, but the historic traditions of the place finally "set him," whereupon he works hard at his cricket and his Latin verbs and becomes a member of the "Library" in Edmund Gwenn’s House, a_ position entitling him to wear tails with his topper, carry an umbrella, walk arm-in-arm with the other prefects while singing the Eton Boating Song, and to do unto the fags as was done unto him. Master Rooney’s transformation into an English public school boy (not entirely complete because he announces that he is going back to the States to play real football at Harvard), is assisted by Master Freddie Bartholomew, who is very much at home, Ian Hunter, Edmund Gwenn, Virginia Wiedler, and an infinitesimal earl named Inky, and it is temporarily hampered by Juanita Quigley and one or two Cads. It reaches its climax on those famous Playing Fields when Master Rooney, holding on to his topper with one hand and holding up his striped underpants with the other, wins the Steeplechase. I admit that I got plenty of laughs, but some of them were probably in the wrong places, and I am more than ever at a loss to understand how on earth we managed ‘to win the Battle of Waterloo.