ADVENTURES OF TARTU

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 269, 18 August 1944, Page 22

ADVENTURES OF TARTU

| (M-G-M-British)

ESSRS. M. G. and M. (British branch) have obviously gone to considerable trouble and expense to make this film. They put two of their

crack script-writers on the story, flew Harold S. Bucquet all the way across from Hollywood to England to direct it, enlisted the services of Robert Donat, Valerie Hobson and some other Important People to act it, and built a huge underground factory in a hillside for the express purpose of being able to blow it up in the last scene but two (well, of course, it may be faked; you never can tell, these film people are so clever, aren’t they?). Anyway, the result of all this AngloAmerican co-operation is a spy melodrama which is reasonably long on thrills but remarkably short on probability. The best and clammiest sequence of the lot is one which has really nothing to do with the rest of the picture; when Robert Donat, as a captain in a bombdisposal squad, disposes of a big one in a blitzed London hospital. Thereafter, Mr. Donat disguises himself behind a toothbrush moustache, a lot of loud clothes and the manner of a gigolo, and thus masquerading as a member of the Rumanian Iron Guard, finds his way inte Czechoslovakia in order to blow up the factory where the Germans are making a new brew of poison-gas, For a start, things go .well. But then, having had considerable initial success in contacting friends of the Allied cause by means of a password from Wordsworth, he inconveniently forgets it as the crucial moment, and wanders lonely as a cloud for several thousand feet, while Gestapo agents and patriotic Czechs (including the heroine, who poses as a collaborationist so successfully that all the Nazis love her) seek to double-cross him and each other. This game of check-and-double Czech continues until the hero is finally cornered underground by the Czech Underground when, drawing himself up to his full height, he exclaims "Gentlemen, you see before you a British officer!" Such aplomb deserves to be rewarded, and it is-with the love of the fair lady, success to his mission, and confusion to our enemies. If somebody like Alfred Hitchcock had been on the job to give the whole film the delayed-action excitement of that opening sequence with the bomb, it would have been great-the best thing of its kind since The Lady Vanishes. However, he isn’t and it isn’t; but although I was not notably impressed myself, I would not dream of dissuading anybody who wants slick, conventional melodrama, from seeing the show.