HATTER'S CASTLE
(Paramount British)
‘THis is the fourth novel by A. Jj. Cronin to have found its way to the screen, but it was the first he wrote.
Audiences who remember his Stars Look Down and The Citadel will look in vain here for any of the "social significance’ which distinguished those works, and they may be surprised to find such a piling up of genuine ‘vintage melodrama. Not so those who have read Hatter’s Castle in the original. They will notice here and there a telescoping of characters and incidents, but the general atmosphere of almost unrelieved gloom and a mounting deathrate remains much the same as in the I enjoyed this picture very much, which may seem a strange thing to say after what I have just written. But the story has so much the savour of the Oldtime Theayter-complete even to the scene of the seduced daughter being turned out into the storm by her enraged father-that it is impossible to
feel it subjectively or to regard it as anything much more than an exercise in juicy character-acting. The period of the melodrama is the 1870’s, and in more ways than one the melodrama belongs to its period. Robert Newton (the actor who "stole" Major Barbara), gives a tour de force in histrionics as the megalomaniac James Brodie, heavily underlining the character’s brutality and arrogance. And Dennis, the shop assistant who precipitates Brodie’s ruin (this is a composite of two characters in the novel), is as slimy a slug as you could wish to tread on: a perfect part for Emlyn Williams, which he plays with all stops open, Another full-blooded character is Nancy, the barmaid, who is Brodie’s mistress (excellently played by Enid StampTaylor). Setting off the lushness of these figures are Brodie’s unprotesting, long-suffering wife (Beatrice Varley) and daughter, Mary (Deborah Kerr), whose docile, almost negative quality is also completely "in period." Deborah Kerr will be remembered as the heroine of Love on the Dole. In this present role her poise and economy of
movement give a curious, but most attractive impression of inner stillness, of being isolated and immune while tragedy gathers about. her.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19440317.2.20.1.1
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 247, 17 March 1944, Page 12
Word count
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360HATTER'S CASTLE New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 247, 17 March 1944, Page 12
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