IN OUR TIME

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

IN OUR TIME

| (Warner Bros.)

HIS would have been a more effective film if it had been even half as topical as the title suggests, instead of its having taken nearly three

years to get here. As it is now, when we think of Poland in our time we ar¢ much less likely to remember the hervic futility of her attempt in 1939 to witb. stand Nazi aggression than her subsequent fate and her present plight in «a starving Europe. The result is that-some of the fine hopes expressed in the film have turned sour by the time they reach us. Yet in spite of this, and in spite also of the melodramantics of some of the cast, this is a pretty good picture. The story in parts is faintly suggestive of something Chekhov might have written; a blunted and diffused Chekhov admittedly, but Director Vincent Sherman tries hard to make the script say something, and occasionally succeeds. This is really no small achievement, since the political. and. social ideas-the confi: ct

between liberalism and feudalism-are so well cushioned by the romantic and domestic details of the love-story that considerable skill and sincerity were necessary to give thern any point at all. Fortunately Sherman knows how to use his cameras intelligently and Ida Lupino is both skilful and sincere: she -plays the little English girl who marries the Polish aristocrat (Paul Henreid) in prewar Warsaw and transforms his life as well as his estate. This is a very good performance indeed, by an _ English actress who has not forgotten how to act during her long sojourn in Hollywood. The villain of the piece is a reactionary Polish statesman who works patriotically enough to keep his country out of war, but goes boar-hunting with Goering for the purpose, opposes (as head of the noble family) his nephew’s marriage to the English commoner and especially their joint efforts to treat the peasants as human beings-by making them share-croppers-and finally skips across the border when the Nazis smash through Poland, leaving the hero and heroine to fight on undaunted. I don’t know how true this portrait is to life, but it seems to have something in common with Colonel Beck or Marshal Smigly-Rydz (remember them?) Similarly, I have no means of knowing whether the hero’s mother actually resembles a Polish grand-dame of prewar vintage, or how close the atmosphere of Warsaw and the country estate is to the original. But it is always a pleasure to see Nazimova (she’s -the mother), and I have the feeling that on the score of background as well as of content, In Our Time can bear rather closer scrutiny than the average Hollywood melodrama about a foreign country at war.