THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 319, 3 August 1945, Page 19

THE MASK OF DIMITRIOS

(Warner Bros.)

FOR once I find myself in agreement with a film advertisement. This picture is described there as "the Warner

Bros.’ kind of thriller,’ and this is an adequate guide to the type of entertainment you may expect-provided, of course, that you know what is meant by the Warner Bros.’ kind of thriller. But if you have seen films like The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca you should have little real difficulty in deciding whether The Mask of Dimitrios is worth your 1/6 or 2/3. For all their air of realism, they are all highly artificial and rather heavily theatrical, these

thrillers; the characters talk rather too much and too glibly; the plots are « little too ingeniously involved and the climaxes are achieved with almost mechanical precision. What you get here, in fact, is not literature but journalesebut journalese of a very efficient kind; as slick and lively and entertaining as it is superficial. I shall not attempt to tell you the plot of this film, except to mention that in general (and as usual) it concerns the efforts of certain tough and shady characters to out-manoeuvre and outwit other equally tough and shady characters; and that in particular it recounts the efforts of a writer of detective thrillers to trace the "story" behind a certain corpse in a Turkish morgue. In the course of his researches he visits several other European capitals, hears stories of spy rings and assassinations, and keeps bumping into’ a suave but sinister® fat man named Mr. Peters. Those picturegoers who saw The Maltese Falcon will know roughly what to expect when told that this rotund rascal is portrayed by Sidney Greenstreet, but for the same reason they may find it hard to accept Peter Lorre in his role of innocent investigator. Mr. Lorre has so often dakbled in murder on the screen that the very look of him has come to suggest the knife in the back or the silken noose, and it is therefore some time before you can satisfy yourself that on this occasion his interest in homicide is purely academic.