BROKEN JOURNEY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 497, 31 December 1948, Page 11

BROKEN JOURNEY

(Rank) T seems to have become an annual custom in the film world for a number of good features to be held back until just before Christmas, so that there is a suitably confusing selection of "festive" entertainment for the holiday-maker to choose from. "This must be what happened in Wellington, anyway, when new films appeared at five of the leading theatres last week-end. Even Treasure of Sierra Madre was transferred to a second-run (though main str@et) theatre after only one week. Perhaps it wasn’t considered bright enough for the time of year, but then the same could be said of Broken Journey. This film makes use of a well-worn dramatic device-sometimes called "the Grand Hotel technique’-in which an assortment of characters are gathered together in a confined space in unusual circumstances and allowed to react on one another. They can be in gq submarine, a crashed aeroplane, or on @ desert island-the variations are endless, and there is almost unlimited scope for good drama, Lifeboat will be remembered as one of the best uses of the device in recent yeats, though an earlier example was Five Came Back in which the passengers of a crashed ’plane had to contend with all the terrors of the Amazon jungle. In contrast with these two films the most notable characteristic of Broken Journey is the way in which everything (with one exception) is played in a minor key. The film has the advantage, for the realist, of being based on an actual crash which took place in’ the Swiss Alps on November 19, 1946. ~ As might be expected, there are 13 on board, of whom. the most interesting are James Donald as the pilot, Phyllis Calvert as the air hostess, and Francis L. Sullivan in an unusual role for him-the effete opera singer who "claims to be (with Caruso) the sole exponent of the "pianissimo with open throat." The others include a patient in an iron lung, a lawyer, a film ster, a displaced person returning home after several years in and out of concentration camps, the world middleweight box--ing champion and his manager, a playboy, and the man from Argentine.- Although they are ngt the kind of persons one tends to meet every day in the street, there ison the other hand nothing sinister about any of them, and the film shows, how much like ordinary people they really are. They all have their weaknesses, yet the producer (Sydney Box) seems to go too far when he makes them all, basically, "decent" characters. Is human nature really like that? It is an interesting question that Broken _Journey doesn’t attempt to answer. There are no ‘heroics about the actual crash. The ’plane simply makes a neat belly landing on the glacier ice, and from then until the survivors are rescued various human reactions take place. The two least expected to do so sacrifice themselves for the common cause, the boxer revolts against his manager, while

the pampered film star and the plausible waster show they are made of good stuff underneath, Comic relief is proyided by Francis L. Sullivan, who has a single gramophone record of himself singing which he plays over and over again until someone breaks it on his head. Even the one genuine attempt to assist, that he makes at last-he ruins his voice in shouting for help-is made ironically funny, as he plays it, by the fact that the party had already been seen before he called out. The high point of the film occurs when one of the party recites over the grave of the iron-lung patient John Donne’s famous sonnet Death be not proud, though many have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so It is spoken quietly, simply, and without dramatics, and with the blanketwrapped figures standing in the snow, the background of icy peaks, and the quiet voice of the speaker, this incident. epitomises the spirit of the film. One small fault mars the general effect, This is the scene where the iron lung patient sacrifices his life by donating the lung’s batteries to the radio so that contact can be made with the outside world. It is lingered over a shade too long for good taste, and ‘seems to cross the critical boundary between high drama and sensationalism. Points worth noticing are the crisp, knife-clean alpine photography and the unobtrusive background music composed by John Greenwood and played by Muir Matheson and the Philharmonia Orchestra. Phyllis Calvert is good without bein; brilliant, and the same could be said for everyone else in the cast.