ROUGHLY SPEAKING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 369, 19 July 1946, Page 32

ROUGHLY SPEAKING

v¢ Warner Bros.)

HAT title is a temptation: a film called Roughly Speaking seems to be simply asking for summary treatment, especially in a column headed up as this one is. How-

ever, 1 am inclined to speak fairly tenderly about it. For one thing, it is clear that everybody connected with the production enjoyed the job, and also felt that they deserved well of their country and their studio. Again, there are not many films which deal with the business of being married instead ‘of with the process of getting married; and there are fewer still in which a married couple is seen with more than one or two children. Since Roughly Speaking is almost wholly concerned with the post-marital career of its heroine, and since she acquires five children more or less as a matter of course, it will be tealised that this is, in’ some ways, a rather unusual film. Added to all this is the fact that Rosalind Russell gets

the opportunity to give a spirited and agreeable performance, part comic, part serious, and very» much. alive. Possibly the fact that it is based on an autcbiography makes the story seem rather more true to life than the average Hollywood fabrication. That the film is also a propagandist document in favour of "the American way of. life," with the emphasis on the virtues of rugged individualism and private nitiative, may not escape the notice of some people-but how many, I wonder, will notice how badly the propaganda misses fire? Louise Randall Pierson (Rosalind Russell) is presented to us as a houséwife of strong character, indomitable optimism, and unquenchable humour. She is, in many ways, an admirable person -but she is also a stupid one, for she cheerfully battles her way through the vicissitudes of 50 years, patiently proclaiming the advantages of the "American way of life," without apparently being aware that a good many of her misfortunes were directly the outcome of certain aspects of that

way. of life. In this respect she is, of course, typical; which adds to the authenticity of the picture. Louise Pierson’s essential normalcy, indeed, is emphasised by the fact that she revolts against the lesser conventions while unquestionably accepting the major ones. She begins her career energetically demanding the right to earn her own living, in an age when women in business were a rarity. Her views on feminine emancipation -shock her first husband (Donald Woods) but it takes the business "recession" after World War 1, plus another woman, to rob her of him. She copes with this domestic crisis almost as easily as she copes with an infantile paralysis epidemic affecting all her children (a: wellhandled sequence, this). Then she takes a second husband (Jack Carson), a cheerful fellow endowed with as much optimism as herself, and as little afflicted by self-pity. They speculate in. a big business venture, and for a brief moment their life is literally rosy: but on the eve of triumph they find they have broken the rose market by over-produc-ing hot-house blooms. Undeterred, they invest what they have salvaged in a pioneer aeroplane company, only to crash again from the pinnacle of success when the Stock Market gives way underneath them. Boom and bust, boom and bust: so it goes on. They survive the Great Depression peddling vacuumcleaners (there is effective tragi-comedy here), and are just settling down to enjoy the fruits of patient toil and private enterprise (having succeeded in putting their boys through college), when the Japs blow up their hopes at Pearl Harbour. All their sons go off to war: but the film closes with Mr. and Mrs. Pierson again planning optimistically for a secure and happy future. At one point in the story, the second Mr. Pierson, delivering the nice, safe "message" of the film (which, fortunately, doesn’t get too much in the way of the entertainment) says: "America is a country where you don’t get shot for dreaming." The trouble with the Piersons and their kind is, of course, that they keep on having the same dream, over and over again. But even two world wars and two depressions cannot wake them up. ;