REUNION IN FRANCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 216, 13 August 1943, Page 21

REUNION IN FRANCE

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F you saw Paris Calling, you'll have some idea of the type of film Reunion in France is; but you have to substitute

Joan Crawtord (she says shes starving, she certainly looks thin) for Bergner, and a chase in high-powered cars for the tension of the piano broadcast from the sheet music, Otherwise, I’d say the films were much of a muchness. Crawford, also like Bergner, belongs to one of France’s Best Families, and is engaged to a high-up chap-not a title, but tons of money; he’s in the engineering business in a big way, and makes tanks and armoured cars. And like Bergner, she beats it on the way to Lisbon when the trouble begins; and like Bergner she comes back — to France in France’s hour of need. Like Bergner she meets a Yank who is in the R.A.F. (it’s John Wayne instead of Randolph Scott) and like Bergner she is horrified when she finds that her fiancé is playing into the hands of the Nazis, going to their parties, eating their rich food, and being spat on by the urchins of Paris. So she goes to Mantanon, the dress designer, whose name even the Nazi women utter with lowered folces, and begins to work

as a fitter devoting herself to France... though what she intends to do for France doesn’t seem clear, Along comes Johnny Wayne, and she gives him shelter, begs money from Mantanon, returns to her fiancé to beg for forged papers for the airman to use to escape back to England. The fiancé is Philip Dorn; he doesn’t seem as sinister as Bergner’s Basil Rathbone. Yes, he’ll get the papers, arrange all, if she will come back to him, back to his heart. . . . Well, she goes back, leaves her job as a’ fitter, wears her wonderful clothes again, drives about in one of her cars with the R.A.F. man as chauffeur. Spies follow them wherever they go. And it’s very exciting, but she has promised to trust her fiancé to get her and the R.A.F, man safely out to Lisbon. Should she trust him? The audience is very doubtful. And What a surprise there is in store for the audienceand for Joan Crawford. If this film were judged solely.on the success Of its propagandist theme, you might have to applaud, because it tells you so very clearly that all the decent people of France, the gendarmes, the dress-fitters, the urchins in the streets, the shopkeepers and the big manufacturers, are quietly working against the oppressor (who is invariably greedy, sneaking, fat, cunning, or lecherous), and that, all. other people, the. s, are fit only to spit on. But that doesn’t seem to me a "very satisfactory way to judge a piece of entertainment, and this one doesn’t make the grade by any other standard,