HAPPY LAND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 11, Issue 280, 3 November 1944, Page 14

HAPPY LAND

(20th Century-Fox)

HIS is a simple, sentimental, well-played piece in the Human Comedy manner (with a few echoes of Our Town), which js scarcely likelv to interest New

Zealanders as much as the people for whom it was made-the average picturegoers of the United States. There is, however,- one incidental aspect of the production which appeals to me as being more worthy of detailed notice than the film itself. The whole story revolves round the fact that a small-town couple (Don Ameche and Frances Dee) have only one son who, having barely reached manhood, joins the navy and is killed in action. The loss is almost too much for the parents, especially the father: thinking he has nothing else to live for, he loses interest in life. The film shows how he regains that interest by being reminded that, although the boy’s life was brief, it had been happy and full, and was therefore worth fighting and dying for. Now the point that seems to me to call for special comment is that here is another Hollywood film about a onechild family. There have been so many (the currently-screening Tender Comtade provides another example of the (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) Same idea) that one almost begins to get the impression that having only one child .is the normal, and therefore approved, pattern of conduct of American parents. In this case especially, the film’s intention is clearly to present the characters and their background as typically American. Is it, then, "typical" for the typical American family to consist of only three people? Now some of us know that statistically it isn’t, just as we know that the one-child family does occur in a great many real cases. Similarly we recognise, those of us who stop to think, that the only-child theme is a legitimate device for producing dramatic emphasis and is therefore frequently exploited on stage and screen. (In the present instance, the heartbreak of the parents depends on it: no man who had other children would be likely to feel such a sense of complete loss as the father does in Happy Land). Yet when all this is said, and allowing for the exceptions, may there not come a point where the screen is not merely reflecting a social outlook but is also helping to create one? If so, the experts may one day come to the conclusion that the Hollywood movie has some bearing on the population problem. Meanwhile, when I hear characters in this and so many other films talking about defending America, and the American way of life, from the Japanese menace, etc., I sometimes wonder whether it makes very profound sense, since at this rate the Japanese may eventually get the place anyway, by sheer force of biology. And that goes for us in New Zealand too, of course, but with this slight difference: we aren’t responsible for making these pictures; we only look at them. Geographical Note: If visitors to Happy Land have the feeling that they have been there before, it will not be surprising. The Middle West town which we see as the setting of this film is actually the same town as we saw in Shadow of a Doubt, and as we shall soon be seeing in The Sullivans, and other films. It is Santa Rosa, California (pop. 10,636), which up till now has been known chiefly as the home of Luther Burbank, but is now achieving much wider fame through its adoption by Hollywood as the typical American town. The cinematic possibilities of the place were first discovered by Alfred Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder when seeking a_ setting for Shadow of a Doubt.