THE WAY TO THE STARS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 388, 29 November 1946, Page 32

THE WAY TO THE STARS

: (Two Cities)

HIS film: has already been favourably noticed in these columns by a colleague who attended a preview in my absence’ some

months ago. (Listener, June 14), My purpose in" mentioning it again, now that it has been generally refeased and I have had the chance to see it, is to concur with my colleague’s high estimate of its quality and to give it the appropriate. grading. This may be useful when the time comes to select the ten best pictures of 1946: for the present indications are that The Way to the Stars will be among them. Actually, the film is now ‘a good 18 months old, and the success which it is achieving with local audiences is therefore particularly gratifying, For these. days, when the patriotic compulsion to approve has been withdrawn, any "war" film needs to have some uncommon quality to attract public attention..It has to be uncommonly far-fetched and romantic; or. uncommonly.good. and. authentic. The Way to the Stars belongs, of course, to the latter class. It ranks, I think, ‘with San Demetrio, London, Western Approaches, In Which We Serve, and The Way Ahead; and may be said to do for the flying-men of the war what these others did ‘for the sailors and the soldiers. Like them, it is an expert blend of the documentary and the fiction film, the type of production in which Britain has proved her supremacy. (But how long will she hold it, ‘and does anybody in control of ‘British pictures really care that she ‘should, now that the attempt is being made to compete with Hollywood on Hollywood’s own terms?) However, The Way to the Stars, though not necessarily more successful, is really more ambitious and more penetrating than those other fine pictures I have mentioned because, in addition to dramatising some of the "types" of the R.A.F. and depicting their day-by-day life on an air-station in Britain in a manner that is entertaining as well as dignified and factual-because in addition to all this, the film attempts an analysis of Anglo-American relations (when a squadron of the U.S. Eighth Air Force takes over Halfpenny Airfield), and goes even beyond this agair with an assessment of human values which is marked by sympathy and notable good taste. This is particularly apparent in Rosamund John’s characterisation of the English airman’s wife and widow; imagine how Hollywood might have debased her commonsense courage with sentimentality. The . film is not without blemishes. For instance, the way in which the English eventually take all the Americans to their hearts seems a little over-done, even naive. I am thinking especially of the loud-mouthed wolf in U.S. Air Force clothing, a thoroughly obnoxious type in English eyes if ever there was one; it would have helped the authenticity of the picture if we had been allowed to go on disliking him. And though the acting and the direction are, on the whole, splendid, neither the camera nor the script-writer has been kind to Renee

Asherson, who portrays the girl with _the awful aunt. Her voice kept on ringing a bell in my memory, but it was not until I saw her name on.a poster after the screening that I connected her ‘with the piquant Katherine of Henry V. These, however, are minor impeffections in a very noteworthy film.