APARTMENT FOR PEGGY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 512, 14 April 1949, Page 15

APARTMENT FOR PEGGY

(20th Century-Fox) PEGGY (Jeanne Crane) is the bright little wife of a rather dull ex-service-man (William Holden) who is studying at one of the glossier U.S. universities. Life is hard. Biil’s rehab. bursary is barely enough to buy vitamin-pills for his wife (she is palpably expectant), far less provide a home for her, and when the film opens they are literally camping on the campus. In no time, however, Peggy has made up to Edmund Gwenn, a disillusioned old curmudgeon of a philosophy professor who is saving up sleeping-tablets so that*he can commit suicide comfortably in bed. If the professor had gone’straight home at this point and swallowed his entire stock of sleeping-tablets one might have got out in time to catch an early tram, and no harm done, but of course he had to fall for the blandishments of the young woman. She instals herself (and husband) first in the old man’s house, then in his heart and a routine sequence of complications follows. She loses her baby at birth (vitamin-pill deficiency is hinted at), but saves the old man from suicide, becomes temporarily estranged from her husband and finally reconciled with him. Even this well-worn theme might have been bearable had there been any adventitious excellence of acting, photography, or, direction, but, the whole is steadfastly | mediocre, and almost as soporific in its effects as one of the professor’s slecping-tablets.