THE CONSTANT NYMPH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 255, 12 May 1944, Page 25

THE CONSTANT NYMPH

(Warner Bros.)

A STAND-UP CLAP for Joan Fontaine but a sitdown clap for the rest of The Constant Nymph, lush

with the starry presence of Charles Boyer, Alexis Smith (she’s good; perhaps she should share in the stand-up clap), Brenda Marshall, Jean Muir, Montagu Love, Dame May Whitty, Peter Lorre, old Uncle Charles Coburn and a few more. And a special sit-down clap for Eric Korngold who wrote the music. You will notice that the film is advertised as being "from the book that made Love Story History." Which is not to say it is the story that Margaret Kennedy published in 1924. Nevertheless, here are the Sanger sisters, a barefooted, hatless, musical four; here is Lewis Dodds, not the original Englishman with his heart locked away in cynicism, but someone called Lewis Dodds, composer; here is Sanger for a scene or two before he dies, an individual, an original, with Montagu Love very adequate in the part; and here is Florence, the: careful, conventional Englishwoman, watching carelessness and spontaneity rob her of Lewis Dodds; and here is her father Sir Charles, bewildered by his runaway _ sister's daughters. This is material for a director to bite his teeth on. But I don’t think Edmund Goulding bit very hard: I think the real biting was done by Joan Fontaine and Alexis Smith-I mean figuratively. First we see Tessa bare-footed, and wet-haired: "I’ve been swimming in the lake and my hair’s all wet and Lewis is coming." Her outbursts of adolescent excitement, her sudden onslaughts of shyness are charming and perfectly timed-even if they are tricks. I know they are tricks, but I don’t mind. I’m quite happy to watch Joan Fontaine being the young, the gracefully gauche, the tremulous Tessa. And I’m quite happy to watch and listen as Joan Fontaine sings her part in the music which Dodds has written for the sisters to perform. The theme of the music is later worked into the Lewis Dodds concert success-he won't be successful until he has suffered, old Sanger said. So Lewis Dodds suffers. But first Tessa suffers. Lewis marries the English cousin Florence, who loves him dearly (in her stiff English way, of course), and Tessa is packed off to boarding-school to suffer. a « And so it goes on to the end, with Tessa having heart trouble, Dodds being slow to suffer, Florence in a panic about her marriage going on the rocks, and Dodds becoming aware at last of his love for Tessa, hers for him. Just another triangle, I feel, with some fine acting, some good music, and some choice lines used up but not wasted on it. Not quite an A-grade film, but almost.