THE YEARS BETWEEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 416, 13 June 1947, Page 12

|THE YEARS BETWEEN

| (G-B-D)

‘Ty HIs adaptation of a play by Daphne du Maurier may be a film to enjoy, but I don’t think it is a film to believe in. It is the story of

Colonel Wentworth (Michael Redgrave), reported killed during the war, who turns up alive several years later and is wery perplexed and annoyed when he finds that his wife (Valerie Hobson), having mourned his loss for a decent period, has taken his seat in the House of Commons and, having fallen genuinely in love with a farmer, was on the very point of marrying. again when he returned apparently from the grave. It’s a good situation for drama, and one that has had some parallels in real life (though not so many as the fiction-writers might lead us to believe). But where the screenplay goes astray, I feel, is in stretching the credibility of even this situation by making. it appear that the Colonel knew all along that he was going to be reported dead; that the ‘whole thing was a putup job by British Intelligence, and that this devoted husband was willing to let his wife, and his only son, suffer agonies of grief in order that he might carry out some vague mission for the "underground" (surely they could have found an unmarried man for the job?) The result is that it is practically impossible for one to have any sympathy for the returning Colonel in his plight; on the contrary, one is inclined to feel that what his wife has done jolly well serves him right and that he is very much luckier than he deserves when, after an harangue by "Nanny" (Flora Robson), she goes back to his arms, And it isn’t the fault of Michael Redgrave’s acting, it is the fault of the script, that instead of making allowances for the Colonel’s distraught and physically exhausted state, you are rather more likely; to regard him as a tyrannical boor.

It would have been sufficient for dramatic purposes if the Colonel had merely returned after being reported dead (as others have before him), without any of this fanciful embroidery about "secret missions." It would, indeed, have been quite enough if he had simply been a prisoner-of-war: a_ sufficiently intriguing situation could still have developed on the domestic front, and the story would then have come much closer to real life. But that is what might have been, One must take the film as one finds it; and I make no bones about saying that I found it artificial and unconvincing, though well acted and nicely photographed, with characters and settings that are very English in a comfortablyupholstered, well-to-do way. Possibly the best sequence depicts the Conservative Party’s method of choosing a Parliamentary. candidate-but even this, I am afraid, cannot be taken too seriously.