JOURNEY INTO WELLES
HOSE Wellingtonians who claim | to take their cinema _ seriously, had the chance recently to prove the strength of their allegiance when two new Orson Welles productions -Journey Into Fear and The Magnificent Ambersons-were shown on succeeding weeks at a B-grade theatre which usually caters for second-runs. This \banishment of the great Mr. Welles was plainly the outcome of the the miserable box-office showing of his Citizen Kane, which badly scared exhibitors all over the world. Unless they were specially vigilant in their scanning of newspaper advertisements, however, students of the cinema might have missed their recent chance; for Journey Into Fear was dismissed in three lines as an associate feature to Seven Days’ Leave, a musical comedy on a return visit, while The Magnificent Ambersons was co-featured with "the Old Killer-diller in a Hottuned Chiller-thriller — Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi (the Three Horror Men) in You'll Find Out." Exactly what an old killer-diller is I, for one, didn’t bother to stay and find out; and having already seen and reviewed Seven Days’ Leave, I was under no obligation the previous week to mix Welles with Victor Mature and Lucille Ball-it would have been a bit too much like hearing Beethoven’s "Egmont" Overture as an introduction to No, No, Nanette or (to bring the simile nearer home) like seeing the All Blacks as a curtain-raiser to a primary schoolboys’ match. So for me the Welles were pure and undefiled.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 253, 28 April 1944, Page 14
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243JOURNEY INTO WELLES New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 253, 28 April 1944, Page 14
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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