OUR VINES HAVE TENDER GRAPES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 356, 18 April 1946, Page 33

OUR VINES HAVE TENDER GRAPES

(M-G-M)

OVERHEARD somebody call this "Our Voines Have Tender Gripes." Well, I don't know about that, but any

gripes I have about this film are certainly tender ones. In this case the substance of the picture is excellent and it is only some of the incidentals that are at fault (unlike Love Story, where the reverse applies). This film confirms me in the theory that the average American child player is streets ahead of the average from any other country: or, since I don’t know much about those from China, Chile, and the Caucasus, I’d better restrict the comparison to America and Great Britain. I can’t say what the reason is, except perhaps that the Ameri cans are naturally less inhibited and more sentimental; or perhaps they have a better understanding of children and the secret world they live in, and so are occasionally able to give us glimpses of it. Anyway, there it is. T'll dispose of the annoying details first: for example, the unnecessary and badly-handled "love interest" between an unprepossessing young "editor" and a country school-mistress who wears highheeled shoes and looks all the time as if she were on the verge of leaving for a cocktail party; the rather uneven and uneasy performance of Agnes Moorhead as the mother; the failure to make more of the by-plot involving the girl who is "not quite right in her mind" (this could, I am sure, have been interesting); the inclusion of other and duller incidents,

with the result that the film is over-long; and the excessive sentimentalism of certain, situations (though on the whole I’m inclined to think that this, like The Human Comedy and Our Town, is a ones aaa true picture of American ife). Having said this, I feel free to praise with only slight reservations the performance of Edward G. Robinson in the unusual (for him) role of a Norwegian farmer in a district of Wisconsin, and without any reservations at all the acting of Margaret O’Brien as his little daughter, and of Jackie ("Butch") Jenkins as her small cousin. Having rhapsodised over Margaret O’Brien be-fore-in Lost Angel, for example — I would be guilty of understatement now if I said anything less than that she seems to me easily the best actress of any age on the screen to-day: the most natural, the least self-conscious, the most radiant. How they make her do it I don’t know: how she can be made to assume that look of rapt intensity or of bubbling vitality to suit the camera is a secret known only to her director (I am sure it is not known to the little star herself: her performance is altogether too spontaneous to be a conscious work of art). Granted that neither she nor Jackie Jenkins gives"us a study of childhood in all its moods. ;,The litle girl would have been much more like some little girls we know if we had seen her occasionally in a real tantrum; if she had got under our skin and on our nerves now and again instead of continually melting our heart. And though everybody knows how devastating the logic of childhood can be, Jackie Jenkins would have been a more complete little boy if just once or twice he had said something that didn’t sound so much like an unconscious wisecrack. All the same, even in a long film like this there has to be some selection, and M-G-M may perhaps be excused for omitting what might have been purely irrelevant or merely pedestrian.

There is no point in describing this film in detail. No one could capture in words the magic and the radiance of some of its scenes. I can only recommend it heartily to anybody who knows children and loves them, while suggesting to others less fortunate that they had perhaps better stay away. But if you are going to see Our Vines Have Tender Grapes don’t leave it too long, for I am not hopeful that it will set records for extended seasons. In fact, as I came out of this film, I could not help reflecting with some bitterness on the conditioning of audiences which makes them prefer the elaborate artificiality of a Love Story to the simplicity and basic genuineness of a film like Our Vines Have Tender Grapes.