TO-MORROW THE WORLD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 328, 5 October 1945, Page 19

TO-MORROW THE WORLD

(United Artists)

‘THis is a horribly disturbing film which should be widely seen for that very reason. As an added incentive, it is very well acted. It poses

the probiem of how the youth of Germany is to be re-educated, through the medium of a story about a 12-year-old German boy (played with diabolic skill by Skippy Homeier) who is adopted into a normal American home which is presided over by Fredric March, and who does his best to wreck the place by behaving in the way in which all good little Nazis are supposed to behave. He persecutes his benefactor’s fiancée (Betty Field) because she is a Jewess, writes obscene remarks . about her on the pavement, and breaks up the --

marriage; terrorises some of his schoolmates and infuriates others; destroys the portrait of his father (who, he has been told in Germany, was a traitor to the Reich); tries to steal Government docus ments to help the Fuehrer’s war effort; and ends up by bashing his nice little cousin over the head with a poker. The film is fascinating and more intelligent than the average, but is probably guilty of two major over-simplifica-tions: in the first place by suggesting that Emil is an average specimen of Hitler youth, whereas it is far mure likely that he represents their quintessence; and in the second place by suggesting that all that is required to turn Nazis back into well-behaved human beings, responsive to reason and kindness, is to give them a good beating-up, followed by some applied psychology, Well, the Allies have carried out the first requirement pretty thoroughly; it now remains to be seen how they mane age with the second.