OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 336, 30 November 1945, Page 18

OUR HEARTS WERE YOUNG AND GAY

Paramount

HAT is a "period" picture? Is it different from a "costume" or "historical" picture, and if so, in what wav? When does a period in

time qualify to become a period in quotation marks? A thesis of no particular value but of some interest might, I feel, be written in trying to answer those questions. My research so far inclines me to the view that by "period" is meant a period not immediately our own; at present the line seems to be drawn by the film industry at about the year 1890, which enables those multitudinous screenplays set in the Naughty Nineties and Edwardian England to fall just outside the "period" class, while those on the other side of the date-line bear what many film men seem to regard as the box-office stigma of antiquity. On the whole the term "costume picture" strikes me as being more appropriate (though unintentionally so), because the players in them often look about as much at home in their costumes as the average adult does at a fancy-dress dance. Ww a Bs * HAT prompts these thoughts is the foreword to Our Hearts Were and Gay, which states: "This is ‘not a ‘period’ picture-unless you are 35 years of age." Well, one cannot speak with authority about the way in which callow picturegoers of 33 or 28 or thereabouts are likely to react to this film; but for anybody like myself who is just a little beyond the half-way mark, it should prove a delightful excursion back to the days of one’s youth; the days of the flapper, the fox trot, and Rudolph Valentino; the’ days when the world was just getting its breath back after one war and was not contemplating another. It all seems a very long time ago. Yet these intimations of mortality from recollections of early manhood are not at all disagreeable. On the contrary, the comedy is as joyous as it is sustained. Trailing clouds of nostalgia, the film’ recounts the innocent but hilarious adventures and embarrassments of two young American girls on a trip to Europe in the year 1923, primarily in pursuit of a husky college youth, but with the general purpose of meeting "other men, older men, maybe even Frenchmen." It is based on the real-life experiencds of Cornelia Otis Skinner (daughter of the famous actor, and now a famous actress in her own right) and her friend Emily Kimbrough, and owes its spontaneous charm as much to this authorship as to the performances of Gail Russell and Diana Lynn. Miss Russell we have already seen as the heroine of The Uninvited: if she can retain her freshness and vivacity; if she can continue to combine a pose of sophistication with the air of the ingenue she will, I feel sure, achieve a niche for herself in the cinema. I have not noticed Diana Lynn before, though I may have seen her. As Emily Kimbrough, it is she who contrives most of the extraordinary but usually logical ‘situations in which the two innocents abroad find themselvesnotably the encounter with the "old geezer" and the night on the bell-tower

of Notre Dame. I like Diana Lynn: she has enormous vitality and a nice sense of timing, and she, too, should go far if Hollywood does not spoil her. Some of my more serious-minded readers may be amazed to see the Little Man reacting so exuberantly, but his heart also was once young and gay and he likes to be reminded of the fact. There is no "message" in this film; it is not great cinema; but there are times when ‘simple pleasures are hard to beat, and this is’ one of them.