(20th Century-Fox)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 215, 6 August 1943, Page 13

(20th Century-Fox)

HIS Hollywood version of Eric Knight’s best-selling novel contains a very attract-ive-love story, and. this is the

aspect that will delight most of the thousands who are seeing it. It is not the story that Eric Knight wrote, and this is something that may bother a good many others. It is also an extraordinarily clever example of the way in which the social pill may be so successfully sugar-coated that not one in a hundred will notice the taste. And it is this above all that interests me as @ critic. For these reasons, and also because it is a popular and much-advertised picture, This Above All is worth discussing in some detail. It-is the story of a young British soldier, Clive Briggs (Tyrone Power), who has fought heroically in France and has escaped from Dunkirk with his life, but without any of his ideals or illusions. His bitterness towards the men who sent him to war and led him when he got there, is expressed in one "leftish" speech that may make some members of the audience gasp and others applaud. His officers, says Briggs, were "stupid, complacent, and out-of-date, with no claim to leadership but birth and class and privilege... ina struggle to preserve the same rotten, wornout conditions that have kept their class in comfort for centuries." So we are not surprised to discover that Briggs, who has been on sick leave from the Army, does not intend to go back to it, and is, in fact, a deserter. Meantime, he is having a love affair with Prue Hathaway (Joan Fontaine), a girl from an aristocratic family, who has joined the WAAFS. Though tinged with pink herself, she tries hard to make Briggs see the error of his rebellious ways, and finally succeeds by appealing to his emotions with an impassioned impromptu speech of the what-England-means-to-me type. This speech is the highlight of the. film, but I hope I shall not be misunderstood if I say that, for me, the light was fairly dim. Joan Fontaine is a very fine actress, but nobody, in my opinion, could put over a speech like that, in that context, and make it sound anything ‘but theatrical. And while theatrical speeches are all very well in their place, their place is not in what purports to be a realistic drama. For that speech has a Shakespearean quality, and yet it is supposed to be uttered extempore by a modern, not outstandingly articulate, young English girl. If she had said instead, "I can’t tell you exactly what I mean, but Shakespeare (or Rupert Brooke), put it like this . . .", and then had gone on to give a straight quotation, with embarrassment at first, but with rising confidence, I think it would have been much better. However, judging by the reverent awe with which the audience received this sequence, mine is probably a aniinority opinion. ‘ AS an obvious concession to the Hays Office, the passionate love affair of Clive Briggs and Prue Hathaway is conducted on the same high plane as the speech-making, so that Prue is able to say to her father (Philip. Merivale): "Yes, father, Clive and I have been away for a week’s holiday together

[which they spend mostly at an inn with adjoining bedrooms], but we did nothing to be ashamed of." When Briggs, reconciled ‘to fighting again for his country, is badly hurt in a London air-raid, Prue marries him at the bedside, and the film ends with the presumption that he will recover. It is a vastly different ending from. the book, in which the hero dies and the heroine is left, unmarried, to bear his child. bd * * SIMILAR toning down, but of a more serious sort, because it throws the whole dramatic structure out of alignment, occurs in the delineation of Briggs’s character. Here is a man with so deep a grievance against Britain’s ruling classes that he is prepared to defy the Army and take the consequences, But just what is that grievance? The speech I have quoted is not sufficient answer. There is not a hint in the film of something which the book makes very clear: that Briggs’s whole attitude is conditioned by the fact that he spent his youth in a slum and suffered dreadful hardship and exploitation. The effect of all this is that the film manages, whether by design or accident, to sit on the fence. It gives an impression of "daring" by letting Briggs (and the girl) grumble just enough about the upper-classes to please the radicals; and yet, by concealing the real reason for Brigg’s attitude, and in other ways, it reveals. the upper-classes in a sufficiently favourable light to satisfy the cohservatives! This, of course, is good for business, but I wonder what it is good for that the film’s basic philosophy should be semi-defeatist-or at any rate, fatalistic. I had better explain. When you come to boil down most of the fine talk, you are left with this sentiment (I _nearly wrote sediment): "Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." When Prue tries to talk Briggs into going back to the Army, she urges him to trust his heart rather than his head; when he discusses his problems with a parson, the latter frankly declares that he can give no satisfactory answers, but that this is not a time for reason, It is a time for faith. This is all. very well, yet one can’t help thinking that if reason cannot supply a satisfactory answer to the question of what we are fighting for, it is a bad look-out. One is reminded of those people who used ‘to be so fond of telling us that we must put our democracy and our civil liberties in coldstorage for the duration. This Above All says much the same thing-=§in effect, stop asking questions, put your intellect in cold-storage while the war is on. And I maintain that it is a bad thing to say. Only once does the film advance a useful argument based on reason rather than sentiment, when Prue pleads, "Well, whatever does happen after the war, let us decide it, not the enemy." * * % WEY, then, is the little man applauding? Because he is full of admiration for Joan Fontaine’s intelligent and sensitive acting, because he found the love story very appealing, and many of the supporting performances excellentand because, after all, any film as provocative as this must also necessarily be interesting,