JUNE BRIDE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 521, 17 June 1949, Page 14

JUNE BRIDE

(Warner Bros.) HERE is an almost nonchalant skill about the way Robert Montgomery keeps you laughing in this picture as he plays the part of a worldly, wolfish, exforeign correspondent who gets a job on a women’s magazine edited by his former sweetheart, Bette Davis. The job is to help cover a country wedding that is to be dressed up and photographed as a typical extract from American "Home Life" (the magazine’s name). His complete poise, and the impish way in which he pokes fun at an affair that he regards as unreal and altogether phoney, help to make some thoroughly satisfying entertainment out of a wellworn theme. The idea is similar to that of Lady in the Dark, where Ginger Rogers was the career-woman editor of a fashion magazine who had to be psycho-analysed into realising her secret love for one of the staff, in that case Ray Milland. But there is no psycho-analysis in June Bride, for the plot resolves itself into a simple conflict in which the male ego endeavours to assert its rightful dominance over the female. Robert Montgomery is, as he says, allergic to career women ("my mother used to nurse me by appointment") and he does everything he can to let his editor know it. He upsets the wedding by causing the bride-to-be to elope with a former boyfriend, and then saves it by marrying the groom off to the _ bride-to-be’s younger sister.. Thus the magazine gets its story and the reporter, having proved his superiority, gets his girl. Bette Davis is unusually good in her role and the only criticism of the film is the lapse from taste out of which much of the humour is created. In order to make the magazine’s wedding story fit in with the pre-conceived notions of the bulk of its readers, Miss Davis and her staff proceed to completely redecorate the country house in which it is to take place (and the family) so as to make them look "modern." Mother is massaged down to conform with dresspattern standards, the wallpaper is distempered over, mantelpieces and ornamental scroll-work are ripped out, sofas are sawn in two, and so on. It is a travesty of good manners and a snobbish slight to'country people that Hollywood seems to have been too thick-headed to perceive.