HOLY MATRIMONY

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

HOLY MATRIMONY

(20th Century-Fox)

F I were not a critic, and therefore not a completely free agent when it comes to choosing films to see, I might easily have missed this show

-or rather, not have missed it but deliberately avoided it-for the trailer which we were shown the previous week suggested that Holy Matrimony would be just a slapstick farce, with Monty Woolley in his noisiest, most cantankerous man-who-came-to-dinner mood. As it turns out, the film is an unpretentious, workmanlike little comedy, with some jolly good acting and an even better script; a film with a real story to tell and a most agreeable manner of telling it. Holy Matrimony’s greatest single asset is that it is based on a book by Arnoid Bennett, entitled Buried Alive. This is not to overlook the considerable contributions made to the entertainment by Mr. Woolley, Gracie , Fields, Laird Cregar, Eric Blore, and several others, nor by the director (I didn’t notice his name) who treats such sacred British institutions as Westminster Abbey, the Law Courts and King Edward VII., if not exactly with irreverence at: least with bonhomie. But Arnold Bennett obviously did the spadework when he wrote a story about a great Edwardian painter who hoaxes the whole British nation by allowing his valet to be buried in Westminster Abbey in his stead. After years abroad,

he has reluctantly returned to London to be knighted; the first evening home, his valet (Eric Blore) dies suddenly of pneumonia; the doctor who has been called in assumes that it is the great painter who has died; and the painter, loathing prominence and seeking only peace and quiet, allows the mistake to go unchallenged, and assumes the identity of the valet. When the enormity of the hoax dawns on him, it is too late}; nobody will believe him; and the valet goes to a tomb among the nation’s great in the Abbey, while the painter goes off to a villa in Putney, on the arm of a widow (Gracie Fields), who, is looking for a husband. But, as the poet has said, "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive": and that is only the start of a comedy of errors in which echoes from the valet’s and the painter’s pasts are constantly rising to trouble the tranquility of the Putney present. Monty Woolley still has the Beard and some of the acrimony of his previous roles, but manages to let you forget that he was once Sheridan Whiteside, and enlists all the necessary sympathy for the character he is playing. Some people may regret that Gracie Fields does not sing in the film, but she doesn’t need to: her warmly human portrayal of the widow demonstrates that her personality is by no means dependent on her voice.