IF WINTER COMES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 465, 21 May 1948, Page 32

IF WINTER COMES

(M.G.M.) [t is a long time since A. S. M. Hutchinson wrote his best-seller, and very nearly as long since I read it. Indeed, apart from the haziest recollections which mostly concerned such minutiae as the High and Low Jinks joke, and Mark. Sabre’s propensity for freewheel cycling, I could recall scarcely anything of the story.. No doubt, in. the main, that was the fault of an erratic and unselective memory, rather than the indication of a lack of substance in the story. And yet the picture left me wondering why the novel was so popular when it first appeared. In attempting to bring the story up to date by setting it in the early stages of the late war, M.G.M. have, I think, merely managed to emphasise that it has not worn well; that it is in fact hopelessly out of date. There is too much sentimentality and too little cold realism for to-day’s intelligent reader and what was once accepted unquestioningly as evidence of self-sacrificing rectitude may seem, to a generation disillusioned by two world wars and one world depression, suspiciously like soft-headedness. What merit the film has is due to finished (but never very inspired) acting by the principals in the cast. Walter Pidgeon, who is bothered once or twice by slight Americanisms of pronunciation, is a tweedy but rather two-dimensional Mark Sabre, while Deborah Kerr, as his one-time sweetheart, has a hard though not altogether unsuccessful struggle with a part which the script does its best to keep banal. Angela Lansbury, as Sabre’s wife, managed to distil a good deal of

venom from her lines and was, I should say, the most successful of the principals, though John Abbott and Rhys Williams were also good. Jf Winter Comes might have been a two- or even threehandkerchief picture 20 years ago, but I heard no’ sniffs in the dark the night I saw it. :