THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 432, 3 October 1947, Page 24

THE TROUBLE WITH WOMEN

(Paramount)

{tT would, I suppose, be a glimpse of the obvious to suggest that the trouble with women is men. But this Paramount comedv is nothine

if not obvious: when they compounded it they seem to have omitted subtlety entirely from among the _ ingredients. They also used a very familiar Hollywood recipe-the girl-shy professor with unorthodox theories who is pursued and pilloried by the girl-reporter but ends by marrying her. "Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck did much the same sort of thing, and did it considerably better, in Ball of Fire some years back; but the audience seems to find the efforts of Ray Milland and Teresa Wright in the present case amusing enough. They even seem prepared to accept Ray Milland as a Professor ‘of Psychology with as little questioning as the governors of Mid-West University do. Pretty soon, of course, the governors and the other members of the faculty begin to have some doubts, when he is discovered with a pretty girl under the bed in his bachelor apartments, and when one of the local papers launches a campaign to ridicule him and his alleged theory that all women enjoy rough tactics from the dominant male sex. To secure evidence, the heroine enrols herself as one of his psychology students; the results are clinically interesting, for the Professor himself reacts smmiediately.., to propinquity with this desirable young | woman and proceeds with scientific de./ tachment to chart his own case- history. Then, just when the girl-reporter and her tough news-editor, (Brian Donlevy) have the poor sap exactly where they want him, she discovers, of course, that she doesn’t want him there at all. American college life, the newspaper world, and courts of justice are presented (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) here without appreciable variation on a hundred other miovies; and though they do it effortlessly enough it can hardly be claimed that the players ever do much more than go through the required motions, But The Trouble with Women has at least one redeeming virtue, Hollywood has in the past year or so been taking psychology -altogethe: too seriously for its own or its customers’ good. This comedy goes in for some obvious but salutary ribbing, not so much of the science itself as uf its more fantastic embellishments and the jar: gon of some of its practitioners. And when the professor, in a courtroom e, hypnotises not the subject of hi. « ut the too-interested judge the audience is at least sent home with a good laugh,