THE PRIME MINISTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 227, 29 October 1943, Page 21

THE PRIME MINISTER

(Warners British)

O the average person, Disraeli and Arliss are almost synonymous terms. Therefore, in putting forward a new screen "life" of the Victorian statesman, Gielgud

was competing against one of Filmdom’s most revered figures in one of its most strongly held constituencies. But Gielgud does not merely fail to put Arliss out of office; it might almost be said that he loses his deposit. It might have been thought that this new "life," being British-made with a distinguished British cast (Diana Wynyard, Fay Compton, Will Fyffe, and

Owen Nares, apart from Gielgud himself), would have avoided repeating the historical bloomers of its American produced predecessor. But if it does not actually repeat them, it makes others just as blooming. For instance, the screenplay puts the young Disraeli straight into Parliament, thanks to his having married a widow, Mrs. Mary Anne .Wyndham Lewis, who has her late husbanid’s seat of Maidstone "in her pocket"; it omits to mention that Disraeli unsuccessfully contested. four elections before he got into the House, and that when he did, Mr. Wyndham Lewis was his fellow-Member for Maidstone! Again, Gielgud is still "Mr. Disraeli" when he goes to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and is raised to the peerage as a reward for bringing back "peace with honour": which quite ignores the fact that Disraeli became Earl of Beaconsfield in 1876, And so on. Few of these factual inaccuracies are as bad as those in The First of the Few. But they are bad enough. And they are unnecessary. Nor does The Prime Minister compensate for them by being distinguished screen entertainment. The technique is "stagey" and so is the make-up (both of the play and of the players). The wordy and episodic sequences are mostly stuck together by newspaper clippings which indicate the passage of time. As Queen Victoria, Fay Compton is surprisingly bad. There are occasional dramatic highlights, and some attempt is made to underline Disraeli’s policy of preserving the best elements in British Conservatism. But what little success the film achieves is in the romantic rather than the political field: as the love-life of an elder statesman, The Prime Minister does give Gielgud and Diana Wynyard the chance to enact some charming scenes of Victorian domestic bliss.