Virtue Unrewarded

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 422, 25 July 1947, Page 8

Virtue Unrewarded

LIKE my melodrama straight and strong, and felt vaguely dissatisfied -. with last Saturday’s Old Time The-ayter item, Snatched From Her Lover's Arms, — or The Menace of Gerald Mummery. I am inclined to agree with the Andrews

Sisters that Money is The Root of All Evil, and what made this melodrama less than a melodrama ought to be was the fact that the heroine, the Lady Delia, was no mere heroine but an heiress to boot (to saddle, to horse, and away, as the villain took it to imply). Which meant that for all one knew there was little to choose between villain and hero, except that the villain hadn’t the sense to conceal his interest in the fortune. Moreover, the heroine seemed a little lacking in womanly modesty, since she permitted herself to be engulfed in the hero’s arms right at the beginning of the play, before, in fact, he had done anything to deserve so stupendous a reward. But any flaws in the writer’s delineation of the three main characters were more than compensated for by his masterly portrayal of the valet (not varlet) James, the most sensible person I have so far met in The Old-Time The-ayter. In the final scene the villain and hero confront each other in the middle of an overhead bridge. The vil+ lain holds the unconscious heroine suspended at rope’s end over the railing. One move from the hero and he will cut the rope. The faithful James whispers in the hero’s ear that she has only four feet to drop, whereupon the hero falls upon the villain and faithful James runs downstairs four at a time to snatch the heroine not the very second before she hits the rails (James is not as spry as he used to be) but, next best thing, (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) the very second before the mail train pounds the permanent way. Logically, the heroine should marry James, but no, she marries the hero, who probably doesn’t need the money nearly so much.