THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 12, Issue 312, 15 June 1945, Page 18

THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER

(M-G-M)

CALING the white cliffs of Dover, from the Hollywood approach, is an emotionally exhausting business," The climb lasts only two hours.

which is considerably less than that required for some of the cinema’s recent endurance tests; but the ground to be covered is so treacly with sentiment, so overgrown with Hollywood, so rank with snobbery, and so many huge closeups keep popping out at you, that it is very hard going. Our Little Man, as you , can see, was flat out at the end of-it, and we noticed a good many others in the audience who were using their handkerchiefs pretty freely, though this may have been to mop their eyes and not their brows. In fact, under another system of grading, The White. Cliffs of Dover would have to be put in the "four handkerchief class"--which in itself is probably enough to guarantee it an overwhelming box-office success. I have not read the long narrative "poem" by the late Alice Duer Miller on which the film is based, so cannot make any comparisons, though I do know in July, 1944, Mrs. Miller’s sister made public apology to the people of Britain for gross and grotesque misrepresentations of their manners and customs in the film, claiming that Hollywood had, "travestied and vulgarised a beautiful thing" and that she was "more than shocked." As I say, I don’t know how beautiful the thing was in the first place, but what interests me most about the picture is the chance it offers to compare the Am-_ erican and the British way of treating a similar subject. In Demi-Paradise, which I reviewed a fortnight ago, a British studio gave us a picture of England as it might be seen by a Russian visitor. In The White Cliffs of Dover a Hollywood studio gives us a view of England and the English as seen through the eyes of an American girl who goes to London in 1914 for a fortnight’s holiday and stays the rest of her life. She marries a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) title, moves into a mansion, bears a son, loses her husband in the First World War, and her son in the second, but grows to love and understand her adopted country. That brief survey covers a lot of time and a good deal of ground. Some of the ground is picturesque and some of the time is well spent, particularly by Irene Dunne, who gives a patient, well-meant, and often appealing performance, and by Sir Aubrey Smith, Gladys Cooper, and Frank Morgan in lesser parts (but not by Roddy McDowall, who is altogether too much of a prig as the son), Yet the general impression conveyed to us through the eyes of the American heroine is a maudlin and highly classconscious one; titled ladies and gentlemen, ancestors, nannies, butlers, and kow-towing tenantry crowd the "English" scene. Allied with this is the impression that all this historic privilege and splendour was only saved from extinction because the Americans decided to come into both wars, And the "message" of the film-that "this time the peace must stick’-doesn’t somehow manage to carry much genuine conviction. "* I know that sone people-and I don’t only mean the thousands who will unconcernedly revel in the show--will think that it is unfair to comment like this on a film that is intended as a sincere and generous gesture by Hollywood on behalf of Anglo-American understanding and co-operation. But I wonder just how altruistic the gesture really was. For, no doubt about it, this film is making a fortune, It is so hard to be sure of motives when the fundamental one is profit.