MY KINGDOM FOR A COOK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 247, 17 March 1944, Page 13

MY KINGDOM FOR A COOK

(Columbia)

CURIOUS little picture this, sometimes very bright, sometimes pretty dull, In many ways it is a direct crib from The Man Who Came to Dinner,

but there are occasional sparkles of originality. ‘Again, there are moments when the action has genuine effervescence and spontaneity, and others when you get a clear impression that the players are struggling with the scrip, trying to keep it alive. Charles Coburn’s character of the conceited, crusty old British literary lion, Rudyard Morley, who goes round shooting off insults and epigrams, is in direct line of descent from Monty Woolley’s role as Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and both derive something more than a beard from Shaw and Joad, with Alexander Woollcott as a collateral descendant. The situation which calls forth Mr. Rudyard Morley’s most studied rudeness: and almost precipitates an international crisis, occurs when on a goodwill tour of the United States he finds himself going hungry because he does not like the popular American idea of food (there wasn’t room on the trans-Atlantic plane for his own cook). So he unblushingly pirates a cook from a woman in the small town where he is staying with his daughter. But this woman also loves her stomach; her son loves Mr. Morley’s daughter; and pretty soon nobody loves Mr. Morley. The strain on Anglo-American relations is relaxed when Mr. Morley has a change of heart as well as of diet. This digestive comedy has its vein of romance; scenes of ardent courtship by the American boy, and coy yielding in a cupboard by the English girl. But the story is’ more successful when it is ‘motivated by gastric juices than by sex hormones.