DEAR RUTH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 443, 19 December 1947, Page 31

DEAR RUTH

(Paramount) EAR RUTH was probably much funnier as a Broadway play than as a Hollywood picture-not that any liberties have been taken in the translation which (so far as one can deduce from the settings, the dialogue, and even the conscious grouping of the players) appears to have been almost painstakingly literal. But the play scored its success in the war years and the film

comes too late to fit so neatly into the mood of the moment. Nor. does the plot excel in originality. ,But sometimes things which are well-worn’ acquire a polish and the dialogue of Dear Ruth is smooth, well-handled, and fast (sometimes too fast for maximum enjoyment). The story, which will ‘evoke more than vague recollections of similar themes, starts with Ruth’s young sister, a sample of junior American collegiate life who would make a saint’s hands itch, This brat (played to the life, one fears, by Mona Freeman) insists upon involving herself in the War Effort to the extent of donating her father’s blood to the local blood-bank, sending lengthy, wires at his expense to Washington demanding for all bobbysoxers the right to be drafted, and carrying on a correspondence with the Secretary of War. She also wears a French beret in protest against the State Department’s attitude ‘(circa 1943) to General de Gaulle. That, however, is not all. Her correspondence has apparently included some _ threescore love-letters sent to a lieutenant of the Army Air Corps on duty in Britain to keep up his morale, and signed in her sister’s name. The fact that Ruth is already engaged, and on the point of being married to a pompous bank official when the airman (Bill Holden) comes bouncing in on a 48-

hour pass, sets the stage in the manner to which one has become accustomed, and from that point the show has not an unexpected moment. Even in its one or two sentimental interludes, Dear Ruth makes no serious demands upon the cast. Joan Caulfield, as Ruth, looks pleasant and if I did not find her as exciting’ as William Holden did that is perhaps because I hadn’t a chance. to read her sister’s letters. My sympathies on the whole were with Edward Arnold, as the harassed father so humiliated at the blood-bank-"Twenty women there as well, but I was the only one put in a cot with a blanket over me." Dear Ruth could, I suppose, be dismissed as corny, but even alien corn is tasty if served (as in the present instance) with plenty 85f butter, and just a dash of salt.