BAROMETER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 491, 19 November 1948, Page 16

BAROMETER

FAIR: "A Man About the House." MAINLY FAIR: "The World and His Wite." : OVERCAST: "Letter From an Unknown Woman."

A MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE

(London Films) N many ways this is a delightful picture, but it would be going too far to call it a perfect little gem-some of the facets are highly polished, others have been left almost in the rough. The direction, at times most satisfyingly sensitive to the finest nuances of expression and movement, is inexplicably weak in one or two sequences and the story -involving treachery, poisoning and suicideis melodramatic rather than tragic. (At any rate I did not feel purged by pity or terror at any point.) But the acting is a delight. If Kieron Moore’s Vronsky disappointed some who had been impressed by his showing in Mine Own Executioner, his portrayal of Salvatore, the Neapolitan major-domo who marries his employer (Margaret Johnson) and then proceeds to poison her most tenderly with arsenical eggflips, should go far to replenish one’s admiration for him. Except for one or two brief scenes in which he wears a black suit and a billy-cock hat-and one instinctively looks for ‘the clay-pipe in the hatband-young Mr. Moore not only,..contrives to look as if he had grown up in the vineyards and olivegroves of Campania, but somehow manages to suggest most subtly the strength and weakness of the Italian peasant character. As’ ‘the English~ spinster whose icy tegetve is melted by the ardent attentions of her butler, Margaret Jéhnson is also worth seeing, though her part is by no means so exacting as Moore’s (it is surprising how the artistic disarrangement of a woman’s coiffure can-key a mood Or suggest a morbid pathological condition), If the direction occasionally wavers, the acting rarely fails even by the twitch of an eyebrow. The most serious fault that could be found with the film, however, is the inadequacy of the story, which fails to probe deeply enough into the conflict between Italian peasant and English expatri at e .