SARATOGA TRUNK

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 29

SARATOGA TRUNK

(Warner Bros.)

SARATOGA TRUNK is packed so full of all the rich stuff of Hollywood boxoffice entertainment that it is

surprising the producer omitted the one detail which would have made the contents completely irresistible to the average screen consumer — Tethnicolour. This film, an adaptation of a novel by Edna Ferber, reminded me a little of a Réné Clair effort called The Belle of New Orleans, starring Marlene Dietrich -perhaps because both have the same skilful and evocative atmosphere of life in the old French capital of Louisiana in the post-Civil War period. It also reminded me rather of Bette Davis’s Jezebel and of Gone With the Wind-in the latter case possibly because the character of Cleo Dulaine in Saratoga Trunk (played by Ingrid Bergman) is a halfsister under the skin to Scarlett O’Hara, and because the Texan cowboy, Clint Maroon (played by Gary Cooper) seems to have gone to the same school of gambling: and love-making as Rhett Butler. * Ea Ea ARATOGA TRUNK marks possibly the crucial point in the screen career of Miss Bergman. I don’t mean that her popularity with the public is in any doubt: her performance here will be rapturously acclaimed by most picturegoers. But Miss Bergman, who once announced that she would never submit to the Hollywood "glamourising" process which has turned many highly individual artists into "just so many decorative zombies," has now, in this picture, put herself within range of that very process, She has gone half way to becoming a Hollywood cutie: it remains to be seen if she will go the full distance. I think she is still fairly safe. It may be that she merely wanted to demonstrate her versatility, after a succession of high-minded roles, by proving that she could play a sexy adventuress as alluringly and intelligently as anybody else in Hollywood. If this is what she wanted to prove, she undoubtedly does it-her Cleo Dulaine is a provocative and bewitching wench, and there are sufficient touches of individuality in the performance to indicate that Ingrid Bergman is still the mistress of her fate. But she will need to be careful. As for Gary Cooper, he has possibly got beyond the stage of needing to be careful: his screen personality as the shy but rugged squire of dames is already sufficiently well established. At any rate, all the qualities which have endeared him to millions are well to the fore as he dances attendance on Cleo and bashes his way to fame and fortune, Since he seems to have the right of entry to her apartment at any hour of the day or night, the relationship between the cowboy and the lady remains morally rather. dubious, until the final scene in which Cleo discards her plan for hooking a millionaire husband and decides (as everyone knows she must) to marry the Texan instead. * * HOUGH the heroine is a baggage, the title of the film, it should be explained, does not refer to her. Saratoga

Trunk is the name of a valuable railroad line, for the sake of which plots are hatched, trains are wrecked, and heads and hearts are broken. But it does not come into the story until about half-way through: the earlier and better part of the film is set in New Orleans, to which city the heroine has come from Paris in order to avenge herself on fashionable society for the wrong which that society once did to her dead mother. She gets what she wanted in New Orleans; and later in Saratoga she gets rather more than she bargained for. I think the audience will also get what they want; they may even conceivably get a little too much-they may feel towards the end that the love-making, though expert, is a little too protracted, and the dialogue a trifle long-winded, But in spite of the mild sense of surfeit that it leaves, Saratoga Trunk is an impressive, if scarcely great, period picture. Some of the best things in it are, curiously enough, only incidental to the plot. There is, for example, the dwarf who attends the heroine throughout and who is such a merry little fellow that, for once, exaggerated physical deformity is far from being repulsive; and there are the performances, both excellent, of Flora Robson as a mulatto servant, and of Florence Bates as an engagingly wicked old dowager. But perhaps best of all there is the cheerful little signature tune which weaves in and out of the story and helps greatly in keeping the entertainment lively.