GOLDEN EARRINGS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 463, 7 May 1948, Page 24

GOLDEN EARRINGS

(Paramount) -T’S astonishing what can happen when you don’t keep your mind on your work. Take the case of Professor Krosigk, for example. The professor was a_ scientist and humanitarian living in the little South German town of Eshbach in the days before the war, yet in a fit of sheer absence of mind he invented a new and ultra-deadly poison-gas. As a humanitarian, the only sensible course open to him was to hand over his formula to the British Government, but’ this put him in a proper fix, for there were Nazis at the bottom of his garden, and Gestapo agents behind every neighbouring hedge. -So, being a wise man as well as a humanitarian, he scribbled. the formula on a five-mark note and sat down to wait for the British Government to come and collect. That was almost fatal, as anyone better acquainted with the British Government would have guessed. Before Colonel Ray Milland and an aide get to Germany it is late in the summer of 1939. After literally incredible adventures, in which the aide dies in considerable discomfort and the Colonel wins through as the result of a purely fortuitous encounter with an amorous gipsy wench who falls for his beaux yeux (and his beau chest), the formula changes hands under the noses of the Black Guards who are taking time off to celebrate the invasion of Poland with a few bars of Deutschland Uber Alles and the Horst Wessel Song. . If they, and the professor, had only kept their minds on their work what a different story this might have been! And if Mitchell Leisen, who directed Golden Earrings, had only kept his mind on his there is no ‘knowing what the film might have been either. To make sense of Golden Earrings as it stands is almost an impossible assignment. It begins as melodrama, threatens to develop into musical comedy, thinks better of it and relapses into farce and slapstick. But since there are Nazis and Gestapo men _ riding furiously through the scenery an occasional reversion to the original melodramatic theme is apparently necessary and _ these lapses sort oddly with the farcical situations in which they occur. Personally, I don’t care how much fun is made of the Nazis, but I don’t think a shot in the stomach is a howling jest even with a Nazi at the receiving end. Nor do I object, per se, to the deglamourization of Marlene Dietrich, who hides her light under a bushel of gipsy petticoats and a liberal application of cocoa-butter. I could stand the sight of her guzz!'ng fish-stew straight from the pot (gipsies don’t use cutlery either), and when she played the zither I took it on the chin. I even had a good laugh, towards t e end of the picture, when she cried "O Spirits of the Earth and Water watch over my Beloved" as Colonel Milland, clad in nothing but his underpants plunged into the Rhine on the first lap of his long voyage home. But when

she picked the pockets of a dead German and then poked round in his mouth to make sure he had no gold’in his teeth I felt that Mr. Leisen was carrying farce too far, and being a trifle ungallant into the bargain. If one is not too prone to queasiness, and if one can go on laughing at the ludicrous and the inane, Golden Earrings may be entertaining. I found it dull. As a piece of incidental information I might mention treat the whole story is related by the flashback method (a device with which most filmgoers will be by now tolerably familiar). It is told by Colonel Milland to that celebrated , newshawk Quentin MReynolds, who appears in propria persona. I had no idea foreign correspondents were so gullible.