BAROMETER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 457, 25 March 1948, Page 24

BAROMETER

(M.G.M.-Enterprise) HIS is the story of a Jewish youth from the New York slums who hecomes a professicnal boxer, wins a world title, and gets involved in the shady practices which apparently flourish most. strongly, in sport, at» the international level. I must confess that I went along to see it. with misgivingsthe trailer had suggested that there would be more sadism than soul in the story, and one gets enough sadism in the headlines these days without going cut to look for it. On top of that the picture got off to a bad start. The champ (John Garfield) is discovered on the eve of his last fight restless and uneasy as he ruminates on the vanished pomps of yesterday. "Everything has gone down the drainall these years," he mutters. Whereupon (believe it. or not) you are shown a close-up of a stormwater drain gurgling away-if I had been presented with a shot of a locust chawing at a calendar I could hardly have been more dumbfounded. Before you can say "Time," the ‘stormwater drain chokes, régurgitates, fades out and there we are back at the beginning of the champ’s ring career: However, if you except one or two scenes which seem unnecessarily brutal (but which are not far out of place in a picture of this kind), this is the only bad lapse in the film. Body and Soul is competently and at times skilfully acted, the dialogue on the whole is good, and there is some attempt to portray a social. problem. I would award the acting honours to Lilli Palmer from whom the script demands considerable versatility. The intellectual content of, the story derives largely from her part, and she plays it deftly and intelligently. I was not so impressed (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) by Hazel Brooks as the Body in the case, but she was undoubtedly handicapped in that the script, which required her to play the part of Profane Love, made her more profane than was necessary. Garfield’s-part fitted him as comfortably as an old slipper. I thought the direction scarcely measured up to the best of the acting. At times it seemed uninspired, even hackneyed, in mannerism — billboards, newspaper headlines and racing traintracks have been used before to denote the passage of time. But the final scene -the big fight-is strikingly well handled, both from the point of view of direction and actual camera work,