CHICKEN EVERY SUNDAY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 517, 20 May 1949, Page 17

CHICKEN EVERY SUNDAY

(20th Century-Fox) HE scene is Tucson, Arizona; the time, 1900 or thereabouts. The girl, newly-married Mrs. Hefferan, waits patiently on the church steps for her bridegroom (vice-president of the bank, etc.), who has just ducked aside to borrow two dollars to pay the minister, As the bridal couple drive along to their new house amidst desert sands and giant cacti, his thoughts are not of ‘marriage, but of a scheme to build a horse-tram service to their part of the town, But his wife has anticipated this, and thére are already two boarders installed at home-just to make sure the mortgage payments don’t get behind while his money is tied up in wild financial enterprises. When their first baby is about to arrive, Hefferan disposes of the tram service to build a hospital which will be "the Best in the West," and she becomes its first patient. Time passes, and with each new business scheme another boarder comes into the house. There is the Hefferan Transport Service, the Hefferan Laundry, the Hefferan Dairy, the Hefferan General Store, the Hefferan Opera House; each of them is the best in the west, but as their creator doesn’t seem to make money from them, the family lives on the profits of the boarding-house. Eventually the mortgage is paid off, and just when they seem financially secure, father, now middle-aged, takes out a new mortgage and even a loan on the furniture to invest in a worthless cop-" per mine. With its failure he realises his life has been a failure too, until in the hour of despair his friends rally around, realising that if he has ruined himself, he has helped build a new town in doing so. (Moral: financial success isn’t everything.) Chicken Every Sunday is a pleasantly satirical period comedy, skilfully acted by Dan Dailey and Celeste Holm. Like Life With Father and I Remember Mama, it is full of whimsical family humour and amusing reminiscences of the Victorian era, but it isn’t as good a picture as either of them. Although

there are plenty of laughs, many of the jokes, coincidences, and eccentricities on which the laughter depends are a little too studied to make this more than a good average comedy. Nevertheless, a good deal of care has been lavished on it by its producer, William Perlberg, and the details of period, dress, and background have been well brought out to create what seems an authentic earlyAmerican atmosphere.