THE LAMP STILL BURNS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 304, 20 April 1945, Page 18

THE LAMP STILL BURNS

(Gaumont-British)

HIS would probably have been a better picture if Leslie Howard had not been killed before he had finished producing it and somebody

else had not had to round it off for him. It might even have been a great one. But though it is never that it is still a good film, and it should have a wide and deserved appeal. What this story about nurses in a London hospital (based on Monica Dickens’ book One Pair of Feet) really lacks is unity and clear purpose, There is too much emotion and not enough straight thinking in the treatment; too much conventionality and not enough cohesion or coherence in the script. The lamp of sacrificial service still burns, no doubt about that, and sometimes very brightly, but not with a clear, unwavering flame; wayward gusts of sentimentality occasionally make it flicker, and in the finale a draught of illogical melodrama very nearly snuffs it right out. This is when the probationer heroine, who is on the mat for resisting discipline, harangues her Hospital Board on the

iniquities of the present British medical system and practically converts them then and there to Social Security. This doubtless is admirable, but one cannot help feeling that where Sir William Beveridge has failed, Probationer Clark would have little chance of success. I wondered also whether it was not so much her speech (which begins, "I urge you to agitate for these improvements’) as the fact that her sweetheart has just presented the Board with a cheque for £7,000 which swayed that august body. Anyway, Probationer Clark isn’t fired; she is promoted, and in the closing scene the lamp is still burning brightly because she has decided to go on nursing instead of marrying the source of the £7,000 cheque. As the heroine, Rosamund John gives an appealing performance and there is some good supporting acting. But The Lamp is most successful in the sidelights it throws on the routine of nursing as a career-the human relationships, the petty tyrannies, the apparent absurdity of some of the discipline, and so on. In view of the present recruiting drive for nurses, however, it may be wise to emphasise that New Zealand

conditions are, one gathers, a good deal less austere than those depicted here. One other point: if theatre managers mention Leslie Howard’s name in their advertisements, I think they should make it clear beyond all possibility of doubt that he was the producer, not the star. To a public that is accustomed to seeing only stars mentioned in advertisements it is remarkable how misleading a name in big type can be: I overheard one or two patrons on the way out complaining that Leslie Howard wasn’t in the film at all!