OUR HEARTS WERE GROWING UP

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 391, 20 December 1946, Page 32

OUR HEARTS WERE GROWING UP

(Paramount)

SEQUELS, as I mentioned recently in connection with Claudia and David, are seldom successful. Claudia and David was an exception to

the rule, but Our Hearts Were Growing Up conforms to it and proves nothing except that charm is a quality which cannot be manufactured synthetically. The original adventures of Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough, as recorded in Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, possessed that quality to a marked degree and it made the screen version almost as delightful as the book. But it was the product of the co-authorship of the Misses Skinner and Kimbrough, who wrote with such autobiographical zest about their youthful exploits on a trip to Europe in the 1920’s and were able to revive the nostalgic atmosphere of that era, but who lend nothing except their names to the characters: of this new screenplay. Without them, our hearts refuse to be lifted up; they remain dull and Heavy during most of Paramount’s purely fictional account of how Cornelia and Emily, as two adolescent misses at an exclusive college become embroiled with bootleggers (in the persons: of Brian Donlevy and William Demarest) and of how the bootlegger-in-chief turns fairy godfather and

all assists, when he isn’t hampering, their precocious love-affairs with two stalwart young men. Diana Lynn and' Gail Russell again portray Emily and Cornelia respectively; they do their best in the circumstances, I suppose, but the bloom seems to have gone off their performances. The film amuses mildly and intermittently, the one really bright spot in it being supplied by an actor named Billy. de Wolfe impersonating a Greenwich village bohemian. I found him good for several laughs. But that is little enough compared with the sustained and spontaneous vitality of Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. The point is that although that first story was obviously "written up" to provide the maximum of entertainment, it nevertheless had the ring of authenticity; the writers had transferred to it some of their own enjoyment of the events they were describing, whereas this new story is forced and artificial. The difference is simply that between the genuine article and the counterfeit.