B.F.'s DAUGHTER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 488, 29 October 1948, Page 25

B.F.'s DAUGHTER

(M.G.M.) F B.F.’s Daughter weren’t over 10,000 feet long, I would find it difficult to resist the temptation implicit in the title, but to succumb to it would be to err as painfully on the side of brevity as the film does on the side of tediousness, and it might also be construed as an ungallant attack on Miss Barbara Stanwyck, who plays the title role. But let me be as brief as is compatible with the proprieties, and the footage. B.F.’s Daughter (which appears to be based somewhat precariously on a novel by John P. Marquand) is what might be termed a bipartisan picture. It opens in 1932, and over a period of slightly more than a decade (at times it seems longer) manages to bow simultaneously to Right and Left, glamourises both Democrats and Republicans, Reosevelt brains-trusters and Wall Street tycoons. Chief of the rugged individualists is B.F. himself, a dyed-in-the-wool TaftHartley type ‘who has built a considerable financial empire by the exercise. of ruthless determination. Along with his other possessions he has also acquired a daughter to whom he has transmitted his affection for money, his faith in its sovereign powers, and an unfortunate and irritating habit of snapping his fingers when arriving at snap deci ms (and big businessmen, as everyone knows, are perpetually snapping). Running true to type, B.F.’s daughter throws over her socialite fiancé with a fortissimo snap, makes a brief sortie from behind her ivory curtain and gets married to an impecunious lecturer in economics (in 1932 they were impecunious). Thereafter the story runs | "smoothly in the groove. (The economist (Van Heflin), surreptitiously underwritten by his wife, begins a coast-to-coast lecture tour and soon awakes to find himself famous. He writes a best-seller (close-up of the! feature page of the Saturday Review of Literature with an article beginning "A surprise win in this year’s literary sweepstakes ... "). He has barely achieved this modest competence, however, when he discovers that it is B.F.’s money that has helped him along: He then falls out with B.F.’s daughter and has a row with \ B.F., whereupon B.F, has a seizure and dies, tragically, before the boom of World War II is properly under way. By a species of Jurgenesque progression the economist passes from Park Avenue to the Washington Pentagon, where he finally manages to reconcile idealism and realism in time for the eed clinch and fadeout. As I loped up the aisle elias lengths ahead of the field I remembered thankfully that life ish’t always what Hollywood makes it out to be, that most

economists can be relied on to add two and two together and make four-and that businessmen and/or Republicans are not all B.F.’s .