THE LAST CHANCE
(M-G-M International)
S film has already been reviewed here in full, by a contributor who attended a preview to which The Listener was not invited. Now that I
have seen it at an ordinary screening I mention it again in order to get things tight for the record; to endorse all that was said before about this noble, exciting, and inspiring Swiss film, and to give the Little Man a chance to register his enthusiastic approval. While he is at it he would like to present an A.C.F. (Award for Conspicuous Fatuity) to whoever was responsible for putting the show on in Wellington at very neatly the most unsuitable theatre in the city. This is, in fact, an almost exactly parallel case with Thunder Rock, so that one might be excused for beginning to suspect somebody in the film business here of deliberate infanticide: of strangling the cinema’s brightest brain-children for some obscure commercial reason. It speaks volumes for the intrinsic merit
of The Last Chance that even an audience composed largely of callow youths out for an evening’s fun at their favourite thriller-and-leg house, received this simple, lovely, humane, and thoughtful foreign film with considerably less restiveness than, looking at them in the interval and judging by their reaction to the supports, one might reasonably have anticipated. This clearly wasn’t the kind of entertainment that many of them were expecting or had paid their money to see; yet they were, I think, impressed in spite of themselves. It is, however, an unfair handicap for any picture. A film like The Last Chance needs every chance, and I am afraid hasn’t received it, in Wellington at least. But, of course, the real objection to this sort of presentation is that when such a film, under such conditions, fails to make the grade at the box-office, some of the film people are only too likely to use the result in support of their argument that "the public as a whole doesn’t want this sort of thing." They are smugly confirmed in their delusion that the taste of all picturegoers is the same as their own. —
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 32
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357THE LAST CHANCE New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 378, 20 September 1946, Page 32
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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