THEY CAME TO A CITY

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

THEY CAME TO A CITY

(Ealing B.E.F.)

F one were to judge this simply as a motion picture, I think one would. be forced to decide, in all honesty, that it is not a particularly good

one, because it is almost entirely lacking in motion (though certainly not in emotion), being just a stage play transferred almost direct to the screen, with the original stage cast and with only one main setting to accommodate a story that is practically devoid of action. But judged on the score of social content, the film is outstanding — always providing, of course, that you don’t object to the progressive ideas about Socialism and the highly provocative (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) dialogue which J. B. Priestley has put into this political fantasy about a wellassorted group of human beings in search of Utopia — and what they did when they found it. If this were a political, and not a film column, I think you might see the Little Man turning appreciative cartwheels in the aisle. All the same, I am not sure that if I had come to Mr. Priestley’s ideal City I would have elected to stay there; from the eye-witness accounts given us by visitors it sounded just a little too prophylactic, a shade too earnestly uplifting for my regrettably mundane taste. I think I would have preferred to join those characters who decided to go back and see what they could do to patch up this old world ‘we're in now. This, in fact, is really a modern morality play. Priestley himself appears in it on three occasions to point (or rub in) the moral, and succeeds in giving a magnificent impersonation of J. B. | Priestley playing the part of J. B. Priestley. With one or two exceptions the other members of the cast do a good job — particularly, I thought, Googie Withers and John Clements as the young lovers. They are very intense, but they have to be; and it is from Clements, as the frustrated revolutionary, that we get most of the social dynamite-those scathing references to Big Business and Rugged Individualism which may or may not have been the reason why several people got up and walked out the night I was there, and which may or may not have been the reason also why Théy Came to a City couldn’t get a West-End release in London or*a booking on any of the main English theatre circuits. And speaking of that, I wonder why it was shown in Wellington at one of the least-popular houses?