THE STORY OF DR. WASSELL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 295, 16 February 1945, Page 19

THE STORY OF DR. WASSELL

(Paramount)

2 OTH. President Roosevelt, who first told\ the story in a "fire-side chat" in 1942, and the original Dr, Wassell himself are reported to be .well satisfied

with this Cecil de Mille version of how the doctor took under his wing 12 badlywounded U.S. sailors when the Japanese invaded java and eventually managed to evacuate them safely to Australia. If that is the case, they are likely to be more easily satisfied than some picture-goers-especially those who have a hankering regard for accuracy and integrity in factual narration. For if this film, really were the true. Story of Dr. Wassell, Gary Cooper, who portrays him, would have to be nearly 60 years of age, and most of the De Millean embellishments would have to go overboard, including all those retrospective bits about snails and broken hearts in China, Dr. Wassell’s peripatetic sweetheart (Laraine Day), those beauty chorus nurses with which the Javanese hospitals are staffed for the ‘delight of wounded Americans, and that finale in which the Flying Fortresses roar up, like Custer’s Cavalry in a Red Indian thriller, in time to save the refugees from the Japs. Indeed, and rather curiously, almost the only thing that might have been retained was the Dorothy Lamour touch: the episode of Three Martini, the Javanese nurse. That, it seems, is authentic. No, Cecit B. De Mille was probably the last man in the world to entrust with the job of telling an essentially simple story of wartime heroism. But of course when it comes to turning such a story into a Super Hollywood Spectacle in Glorious Technicolour, Mx De Mille | can’t be beatan.