I'LL BE SEEING YOU

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 330, 19 October 1945, Page 19

I'LL BE SEEING YOU

(Selznick-United Artists)

HIS is. the kind of picture that needs to be made, but to be really effective it needs to be made a little better than happens here. J’ll1 Be Seeing

You is the story of a neuro-psychiatric casualty of the present war (more simply, a shell-shocked soldier) and his efforts to restore himself to normal, When it is dealing with real life, as it is most of the time this special problem is under consideration, the picture is very good, thanks largely to Joseph Cotten’s intense and tortured, but restrained, performance as the soldier. But when it is dealing with life according to Hollywood --that is, when Ginger Rogers is on the scéne with a very special problem of her own-it is not so good. Miss Rogers, too, gives a good performance: it ig not her fault that the character she plays unnecessarily complicates the story, obscuring and confusing the central theme. Miss Rogers, you see, is here presented as a gaolbird on furlough; a girl who went to prison for a fairly innocent case of manslaughter and has been let out for Christmas leave with her aunt and uncle, but must go back behind the bars again in a few days’ time. Girl meets soldier; she introduces him to "her folks"; they fall in love; he tells her what’s wrong with him; she doesn't tell him what’s wrong with her-at first because she doesn’t want to lose him, then because she doesn’t want to retard his mental recovery by giving him a shock. When he does eventually receive the shock it doesn’t harm him, and of course it doesn’t make any difference to true love, either. He'll be waiting outside the prison when she finally is released. Now, it is possible that a lonely shellshocked soldier might meet such a special kind of girl in such exceptional circumstances as these-but the chance is about one in a million. However, this lapse into attificiality is the only serious fault in the film, which I recommend to you for the acting (Shirley Temple is also in the cast), and particularly for the direction. William Dieterle’s handling of the scenes which reveal the torment in the mind of the soldier is masterly: particularly that sequence in the Y.M.C.A. bedroom where, alone and terrified, he fights and conquers his disability.