PERFECT STRANGERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 364, 14 June 1946, Page 30

PERFECT STRANGERS

(Korda-M-G-M)

| FIND that I have left myself comparatively little space in which to discuss this picture. A pity, because it deserves

attention, not merely as Sir Alexander Korda’s first production for several years, but also as one of those rare films about the war which make use, not of the melodrama in the front line, but of the drama, as it were, on the back doorstep. Perfect Strangers shows the metamorphosis which war brings about in the characters and lives of a colourless married couple in a London suburb. Robert Donat is Mr. Wilson, a humdrum, plodding, unimaginative clerk in a big firm; he joins the Navy in 1940. Deborah Kerr is his dowdy, unromantic wife, snivelling through her boring existence with a perpetual cold; she becomes a Wren. Life in the Services changes them spectacularly-rather too spectacularly perhaps for realism, but a producer may be allowed some latitude. The husband loses his inferiority complex, his mousy moustache, and his air of suburban respectability, and becomes a man of action; the wife loses her perpetual sniffle, learns to smoke, use lipstick, and be attractive to men. When they meet again after three years’ separation, both have decided that they cannot return to the old boring life together; each expects the other to be as dowdy as when they parted. At first the shock of finding so great a change produces bewilderment and conflict; but as the curtain goes down we are left with the comforting assurance that divorce is no longer contemplated and that they will continue happily as Mr. and Mrs. Wilson. I am by no means sure that this film is as fundamentally true to real life as it may appear on the surface. There is rather too much special pleading from the particular to the general. Not all disrupted wartime marriages will’ be resumed as comfortably, especially in those cases where only one party has had the experience of service and has found wider horizons. And I think it is also a significant lack in the story that

the question of children is never once introduced. The presence, or the absence, of a family would surely be a contributing factor in such a domestic situation as this, and might well have been referred to. Yet though Perfect Strangers only skims the subject, it is at least something that the subject Was approached at all, for the theme is undoubtedly timely and important. Some other producer may give it a more profound and realistic treatment. In the meantime, Alexander Korda, ably assisted by the stars, and by Georges Perinal as cameraman, has given us a lively and frequently amusing British picture, which is only slightly marred by excess footage and by some inconsistency of mood. :