WHITE CRADLE INN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 489, 5 November 1948, Page 24

WHITE CRADLE INN

(London Films-British Lion) | HITE Cradle Inn is a_ pleasant enough little picture to look at, but not such a successful one from the dramatic point of view. The setting of the story is Switzerland, and the, exterior scenes were all faithfully shot in one of the high alpine valleys or on the flanks of adjoining peaks, but the mountains are not really an essential element in the story-except towards the end when they are more or less dragged in to provide a cheap, easy solution for the emotional problem which the scriptwriters have got themselves involved in. ‘This is rather a pity, for the emotional problem is sufficiently removed from the commonplece to be worthy of better treatment than it gets. There is a conventional enough framework. to the plot in the triangular relationship between Madeleine Carroll, the proprietress of the White Cradle Inn, her shiftless ne’er-do-well of a husband (Michael Rennie) and the village doctor (Ian Hunter), but there is a complicating factor in the person of a small boy, a French war orphan who has come to the inn as an evacuee and made a place for himself in the. woman’s affections which her husband cannot or will not (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) fill. Even this slight complication, howeyer, is too much for the scriptwriters to handle satisfactorily and the husband has to be killed off in a rather improbable climbing accident in order to make way for the Happy ending. Yet in spite of its dramatic shortcomings White Cradle Inn was not unsatisfying. » It had numerous incidental attractions-some mild comedy at the expense of village officialdom, good character studies by one or two minor players, and, of course, the mountains, which are always photogenic and always worth contemplating.