THIS LOVE OF OURS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 368, 12 July 1946, Page 32

THIS LOVE OF OURS

(Universal)

‘THis is a very tender romance; so tender that it is almost mushy. The mechanics of the plot, and the sentiments expressed therein, belong properly

to the mid-Victorian school of moral melodrama, even though the story is fashionably and even luxuriously dressed in the modern manner and attributed to no less a playwright than Pirandello. Though the title might suggest love »of another kind, mother-love is the mainspring of the action, the chief characters being a wronged wife (Merle Oberon), thrown out into the cruel hard world by her husband, under false suspicion: of infidelity; their little daughter Suzette, who worships the memory of her supposedly dead mother; and of course the remorseful husband himself, a famous doctor (Charles Korvin). There’s another character, a night-club artist who wanders in and out of the picture tossing off lightning caricatures and epigrams but who has little direct relation to the plot. However, since this role is played by Claude Rains, I’m glad

to have him around. He does help a little to take one’s mind off all the soulsearing suffering that occurs when the eminent Dr. Touzac brings back to his country estate an embittered cafe entertainer whom he has rescued from suicide in Chicago, and announces that she is his bride. Much of the suffering is done by the small daughter, a morbidly sentimental 12-year-old who doesn’t want to acquire a stepmother one little bit because this will clash with,a kind of Shinto-worship which the sweet child practises daily at a shrine in the garden. Though it is casually dismissed as "just something she fixed up with the help of the old gardener," this shrine is really a most elaborate affair, a miniature temple resembling an undertaker’s parlour, complete with wroughtironwork and a stained glass window dedicated "To the memory of My Dear Mother." Poor dear child, little she knows (though of course the audience does) that the hated newcomer in the household is none other than the mother whose sainted memory she cherishes every day with tears and floral tributes. For her father the doctor, you see, has a dread secret;"ten years before in Paris, believing his wife to be a wanton, he

straightway cast her out-not into the snow, but that is the only thing missing from this touching episode. Not till long after does he learn that she was doing no more than give piano lessons three times weekly to a blind man in order to help with the household expenses. One should, I suppose, feel sorry for Dr. Touzac, who is now duly repentant; but any husband who would so summarily dismiss a wife, and any medical man who would encourage a small child in the morbid fancies affected by Suzette, seems to me deserving of small sympathy. Perhaps I might have warmed a little more towards Dr. Touzac if -he had worn a beard-a reference which those who see the picture will doubtless understand.