THE COURTNEYS OF CURZON STREET
(London Films) VV HEN The Courtneys of Curzon Street won the British National Film Award for the most popular picture of 1947 that made two wins in a row for Herbert Wilcox, the producerdirector. It must be assumed, therefore, that Mr. Wilcox knows his public, and it is perhaps fair to assume too that forty million Britons (or a substantial percentage of them) can’t be wrong so consistently. Even so, I could not regard this film as other than trashy, sentimental, romantic stuff. Stouter proletarians would, I imagine, be even more forthright in their selection of epithets: The saga of the Courtneys is really the romance of Cathie O’Halloran (Anna Neagle), personal maid to old Lady Courtney, whe falls in love with and eventually marries the’ Young Master (Michael Wilding) at the turn of the century. Following faithfully the behaviour pattern set down for such stories, Cathie ‘discovers shortly after her marriage that their union is endangering young Edward’s military career (Household Cavalry and all that) so she decides to Leave Him Forever and retreats to Ireland with her mother. Edward goes to India to forget and does it so effectively that the 1914-18 war is half over before he meets his wife again and makes the acquaintance of his fifteen-year-old son. Cathie by -this time is the most glamorous figure on the English musical comedy stage, and of course socially quite acceptable,
so the happy lovers are reunited and remain so to the end of the chapter. But don’t be impatient-the end of the chapter is a long way off yet. Young Edward (Edward III, I mean) grows up in the manner to which we have now become accustomed, joins the Household Cavalry, marries a nice girl, and goes off to India. But he gets shot in the Khyber Pass and his young wife dies in childbirth, leaving another young Edward Courtney to grow up, join the Army, marry a nice girl.... But I’m getting ahead of the film. He’s just on the point of marrying her when the film ends, having followed the spiralling story of the Courtneys from Spion Kop to VE-Day. By the time it was over I felt that I too had Lived These Years, that if the Social Security office had only been open I could have tottered in and applied for the age benefit.
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 16
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396THE COURTNEYS OF CURZON STREET New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 475, 30 July 1948, Page 16
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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