"HENRY V" AT LAST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 366, 28 June 1946, Page 30

"HENRY V" AT LAST

ENRY V is at last going to be shown in New Zealand. According to present plans it will be released first in Christchurch some time in July (probably about the middle of the month), with Audékland and Wellington to follow round about September. Dunedin and the rest of the country will come later, depending on such circumstances as existing commitments for British product and the extent to which the film catches the public fancy and runs for extended seasons. I am very happy to be able to pass on this news, mainly because we have waited altogether too long in New Zealand to see this British masterpiece, but also because I hope it will satisfy all those people who, ever since I reviewed the film last November, have been writing to me and phoning me, at home as well as at the office, to ask when they will be able to see it. The tone of some of these inquirers rather suggested that they thought I must be keeping the film in my own pocket; but their impatience is understandable. I saw Henry V for the second time the other evening, at a preview arranged in Wellington for the benefit mainly of people in the educational world. It would be possible for me to write a lot more about the film than I have already: at the second viewing one notices points one overlooked before, and certain first impressions are confirmed and strength-ened-for example, that the comic interludes are the flattest parts of the production, while the most effective cinematically are those which Shakespeare did not write (I mean the Battle of Agincourt sequences). But I think it is enough now merely to endorse the opinion of the American magazine Time, which prefaced a three-page review of the film with the statement that in Henry V "the movies have produced one of their rare great works of art."