FANNY BY GASLIGHT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 327, 28 September 1945, Page 18

FANNY BY GASLIGHT

(Gaumont British)

ICHAEL SADLIER’S novel of this name accomplished the difficult feat of remaining a tender and beautiful romance in spite of its thoroughly

sordid setting — the hypocritical London of the 1870's, where sin and sanctimoniousness, ostentation afd secrecy, flourished side by side. To be made suitable for screening, however, the story has been laundered, and in the process most of its distinction has been washed out. The result has been to make the defects of plot-construction and character-drawing, which were inherent in the original story, but were fairly well concealed, stand out much more noticeably. Again, by chopping off the beginning and end of the novel, which present Fanny as an old woman in France, and also by making it appear that Fanny's lover survived the duel which kills him in the book, the producers of the film have lost that sense of dedication in the romance which set it well above the ordinary. In fact, what we ere now left with is just a novellettish melodrama in which almost everybody behaves in a thoroughly midVictorian way; or more correctly, in the way commonly associated with mid-Vic-torian melodrama. That is to say, either very virtuously or very villainously. {t is hard, for instance, to take, seriously

a heroine as wronged and as long-suf-fering as Fanny (Phyllis Calvert), or a villain as doggedly black-hearted as Lord Manderstroke (James Mason). It is much easier to do so in the book when you know that Fanny, who was so shocked as a young girl to discover that her supposed father was running a brothel in the basement, ran a similar establishment of her own in later years and yet remained an attractive character. Real life is largely made up of just such contradictions as this. But the film, in spite of good period settings and some competent acting, seldom gives even the illusion of reality.