THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 403, 14 March 1947, Page 14

THE DIARY OF A CHAMBERMAID

(Benedict Bogeaus-United Artists)

{Y colleague on the BBC Listener has described this as the kind of film which might have resulted if Chek-

hov, Edgar Allan Poe, and Elinor Glyn ‘had all worked on the script, each without being allowed to see what the others had written. The only way I can think of improving on that description would be by. adding Freud to the list. A more amazing concoction of irreconcilable elements I never expect, or want, to see; and the pity of it is that the director responsible for this fantastic rigmarole was Jean (continued on. next page)

(continued from previous page) Renoir, the Frenchman whose splendidly simple and honest film The Southerner came in for so much praise in this column a week or so ago. I think it may be*kindest to suggest that Renoir lent himself to it in a mood of peevish perversity brought on by an acute attack af Hollywooditis, and is probably now regretting that he did. True, there is a certain indefinable quality about some aspects of the new production-the costuming, the lighting, and the atmosphere of the little village -which, \though indefinable, will possibly be defined by the cognoscenti as typically French: and it may be that, if I knew more about surrealism, dada-ism, or even elementary psychology, I would appreciate what the co-producers, Benedict Bogeaus and Burgess Meredith, assisted by Director Renoir and the cast, are getting at in this version of Octave Mirbeau’s 19th century story, Celestine -The Diary of a Chambermaid. However, at the risk of being immediately discarded by the cognoscenti as an ignoramus and a Philistine, I must reiterate that I found it a mess-as much of a mess as a painting by Salvador Dali, which it somehow resembles. The scene is laid in France in the last quarter of the 19th century, and Paulette Goddard (in private life Mrs. Meredith) plays Celestine the chambermaid who goes to work for a rich provincial family in the hope of living a quieter and more profitable life than she has found in Paris. A wealthy husband is what she chiefly wants, and at least there is no lack of suitors. Almost from the moment she arrives she is pursued with amorous intentions by the

crazy old master of the house (Reginald Owen); by his even crazier old neighbour (Burgess Meredith) who capers madly about the garden hurling rocks into glasshouses and who subsists on a diet of roses and water-lilies which he gobbles up at every opportunity; by a sinister thieving valet (Francis Lederer) who has a nasty habit of killing geese by sticking a steel spike through their brains, arid who finally disposes of that silly old goose, the flower-eater, by the same method; and by the son of the house (Hurd Hatfield, ex-Dorian Gray) who looks like R. L. Stevenson and is consumptive as well as neurotic. Two other choice specimens, both of whom appear to suffer from some form of Oedipus complex, are the mistress of the household and the fat housekeeper of Mr. Meredith, the former being also afflicted with severe class-consciousness. Amid all these more or less patho--logical types, Miss Goddard somehow manages to retain her sanity and even succeeds eventually in getting herself a rich husband — True Love triumphs over T.B.-but I shall be surprised if any audience retains its patience let alone its sense of humour much past the point where the story ceases to be a joke and degenerates into a welter of novelettish melodrama,