SPEAKING CANDIDLY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 276, 6 October 1944, Page 22

SPEAKING CANDIDLY

THE HEAVENLY BODY

(M-G-M)

(CORRECTLY illustrated, the attitude of our little man at this film would be shown as somewhere between the upright

and the prone position, but as that is a difficult pose to maintain, he has given the show the slight benefit of the doubt. There is, in fact, just enough material in the plot for a film about a quarter the length; but once we have had the proposition placed before us of an eminent astronomer (William Powell) who has to stay up all night looking at the stars while his wife (Hedy Lamarr) yearns for romance and turns for comfort to astrology and an air-raid warden (James Craig); once the director and the cast have exhausted all the double enfendre possibilities in archly scientific talk about the collision of heavenly bodies; once this has happened there is nothing left except fatuous millingaround, which ‘seems to have no other purpose than to use up the quota of film which M-G-M allocated for the production. Only two other aspects of The Heavenly Body are worthy of comment. One is the fact that M-G-M are apparently prepared to give some official support to the hocus-pocus of astrology, since the predictions in the wife’s horoscope are shown coming true to the minute and the letter. The other is how William Powell, Hedy Lamarr and James Craig managed to maintain even. a show of interest in the film when towards the end they must have been almost as fed up with the whole silly business as our little man was.