JOURNEY FOR MARGARET

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 237, 7 January 1944, Page 19

JOURNEY FOR MARGARET

(M-G-M)

AS§ propaganda, Journey for Margaret has _ probably reached us about three years too late, That is to say, if its

primary propagandist intention was to arouse our sympathy for the blitz victims of London, it would obviously have been more effective if we could have seen it before the Allied air forces started to bomb Germany harder than the Germans have ever bombed Britain. But as a dramatic portrayal of the misery and bewilderment suffered by the innocent victims of air terror anywhere, Journey for Margaret is as moving as it is appealing, as harrowing as it is sentimental. What the picture does supremely well, and does in spite of some stumbling and fumbling, is to bring home the essential tragedy of the young child in modern war-his desperate quest for security, and his acceptance of such wartime emergencies as blackouts and air-raid shelters as normal conditions of living. It is able to do this tor three chief reasons: because an American war correspondent, William L. White, adopted a little London girl who had been made an orphan in the 1940 blitz, took her home with him to America, and wrote a book about her on which the film is based; because M-G-M were able to find for the role a five-year-old child who already seems to have forgotten as much about acting as the average adult player has ever learnt; and because the studio entrusted the direction of the film to someone who understood the ways of children. Robert Young plays the role of the U.S. war correspondent with considerable finesse, and Laraine Day is good as his wife, who goes back to America after her baby dies in an air-raid; but it is the child stars-William Severn as four-year-old Peter, and especially Maxine O’Brien as Margaret -who make Journey for Margaret well worth the price of your ticket.