THIS MAN IS MINE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 458, 2 April 1948, Page 25

THIS MAN IS MINE

(Columbia) MONG the more private memoranda of every successful film producer there is (I like to imagine) one wellthumbed entry which reads something like this: "A Cheap Easy Dish for a Large Public-To the script of one successful stage show, add two or three outdoor ‘sequences, a small handful of stars (preferable with stage experience), and several camera angles. Photograph with one eye on the original stage directions and cut carefully before serving." Within reasonable limits this recipe is fairly foolproof. If the producer chooses his play sensibly and if the stars know their job the result is at least tolerable entertainment.. If the several ingredients are all frst-class, the picture can hardly fail to ieach the same classification. But there is a danger that the lapse of time between the first appearance of the play (which must run a while before it can prove itself) and the release of the film may leave the latter a trifle passé before it arrives, if you see what I mean. Dear Ruth, for example, which reached. the New Zealand screen last year after several seasons as a Broadway show, arrived with some of the bloom rubbed. off- though it was still passably good entertainment. This Man is Mine, based on Reginald Beckwith’s play A Soldier for Christmas, is in many ways very like Dear Ruth. This time the setting is an English home, the time is 1942, and the unexpected guests are a Canadian soldier (Hugh McDermott) and a pert little NAAFI (Glynis Johns). Life in the home is already complicated for Father (Tom Walls), Mother (Jeanne de Casalis) and Daughter (Nova Pilbeam) by the presence of another daughter who has run away from her husband, a backroom boy who has been billeted on them (and with whom Miss Pilbeam has fallen in love) and a cook who’d much rather write detective stories. Inevitably, both Miss Pilbeam and Miss Johns set their caps at the Canadian and the story follows the normal routine of comic misunderstanding, mild adventure and final pairing off. The Canadian, being merely a private soldier, knows his place and pairs off with the NAAFI, leaving the daughter of the house to the billetee, who is a Pretty Sound Type (even if he isn’t in uniform) and socially quite acceptable. One would need to have lived in wartime England to understand and appreciate all the jokes, but there is no specialised knowledge required to laugh at Jeanne de Casalis’ Mrs. Feather routines, and Tom Walls, who has mellowed appreciably with the years, was a good foil for her. I didn’t feel so happy about Nova Pilbeam, who hhasn’t the face for comedy, and doesn’t seem to have the inclination either, but apart from her the casting was compe- . tently done. McDermott played the part of the soldier with just the right amount of self-assurance-was, in fact,

a much more credible character than he needed to be in a comedy of this kind. But it wasn’t Miss Pilbeam’s face, or Mrs. Feather’s faux pas, or the habitual tendency of Tom Walls to indulge in what the. Freudians call Tendency Wit that left me brooding. It was the invitation, however uffintentional, to look back at those good old days of 1942, when (even if there was a war on) there was plenty of fun and excitement, and when austerity signified only an unfortunate state of mind.