IT HAPPENED ON FIFTH AVENUE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 477, 13 August 1948, Page 24

IT HAPPENED ON FIFTH AVENUE

(Allied Artists-B.E.F.) S the story of Aloysius T. McKeever} a philosophical tramp who has for some years solved the residential problem by installing himself as unofficial caretaker in the empty .mansions of migrating millionaires, this picture begins well. McKeever-surely one of the few Irishmen to turn absentee landlordism to his own advantage-repre-sents a. bright idea on someone's part, and Victor Moore’s eroded dignity and asthmatic diction fit the character te perfection. But someone else could not leave well alone and before it has time to blossom properly the bright idea is spoiled by the addition of about a dozen other characters-stereotypes with whom one has become only too painfully familiar over the years. The most dogeared of these is the cantankerous but fundamentally good-hearted. millionaire whose devotion to business has brought him nothing but. domestic unhappiness and ulcers, There is also his divorced wife, in whose eyes the love-light still flickers bravely, but who has been eating her heart. out alone in a miserable 25roomed shack at Palm Beach. And there is (but inevitab'y!) the millionaire’s wilful daughter who wants to be loved for herself alone and is scared stiff in case her Young Man (a homeless and penniless war veteran) will discover her rating on the~ social cashregister and turn her down. In addition to these three perennia s (and the young man) there is the now familiar troupe of war veterans, plus wives and babies, all at the moment homeless and hard up but all full of big business ideas and ready for translation to the upper income bracket as soon as the millionaire has a change of heart. It is fair to say that the picture has its bright interludes, but to the critical at least these will be interludes only and the story as a whole is an indigestible mixture of over-sweet sentiment, folksy philosophising by the McKeever, and

generally romantic hokum. The kind of thing, in fact, which would be acceptable as Christmas pantomime (when the prevailing atmosphere of goodwill makes even critics charitable), but which is more likely to induce cynicism when distance lends its customary disenchantment to the festive season. But I have no doubt that It Happened on Fifth Avenue, like the homeless veterans aforementioned, will make lots and lots of money. As Abraham Lincoln put it, about a hundred years ago, "People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like."