MR. BELVEDERE GOES TO COLLEGE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 522, 24 June 1949, Page 20

MR. BELVEDERE GOES TO COLLEGE

(20th Century-Fox.) HEN I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Belvedere I felt that he owed most of his success as a comic character to a skilful development of that form of acidulated repartee so effectively employed by Alexander Woollcott, and later by Monty Woolley, in The Man Who Came to Dinner. [I was still thinking along the same lines a fortnight ago when I carelessly placed Clifton Webb (alias Lynn Belvedere) among those for whom the witticism or wisecrack is the main instrument of comedy. Since then, however, I have had the opportunity to meet Mr. Belvedere again and revise an estimate which now seems to have recorded rather less than the truth. After a week-end of solemn pondering I have concluded that as well as being a vehicle for wit he is a Sign of the Times, and that when we laugh at him there is a tinge of rue and envy in our- laughter. In the world of the hollow men, Mr. Belvedere stands solid and impregnable in the reinforced concrete of his self-assurance. It is not simply that he is a genius, but that he says so. His rudeness bears the mark of very truth. In a generation of timorous yes-men, Mr. Belvedere is a noman, and as every schoolboy now knows, 'No-man is an Island, Entire of Itself. Mr. B. is fully self-contained. Or he should be, to run true to form. It grieves me to record that in his second ‘screen appearance he doesn’t quite do that. Mr. Belvedere Goes to College, like so_many sequels, does not quite reproduce the spontaneous entertainment of Sitting Pretty; in places it is rather forced fun, And, in addition, the authors of the film script have been guilty of at least three tactical errors. According to the story (which is easier to follow if you saw the first film), Mr. Belvedere’s best-selling novel Hummingbird Hill, written between bouts of baby-minding, has brought him not only fame but lawsuits and all his royalties have been swallowed up by libel-actions. A’ way to restore his blitzed finances opens up when he is offered a 10,000-dollar literary prize, but one of the conditions of the award is that the recipient shall hold a university degree, and Mr, Belvedere’s formal education was, on his own admission, "confined to two revolting weeks in kindergarten." | He accordingly enters Clemens’ University with the announced purpose of completing the four-year course in one year. That was the first tactical error in the story-the assumption that Mr. B.’s dignity and self-pos-session could survive the fimpact of Hollywood undergraduate life. I would have been prepared to believe that he could wear a sanbenito with the hauteur of a Castilian hidalgo, but after seeing him in one of those funny little freshmen caps I was forced to conclude that the Belvedere dignity was not so impregnable as we had been led to believe. The second error-this time simply an instance of sheer carelessness -was the disclosure, after Mr, Belvedere won the pole-vault at the v. sophomore meeting, that the 14-foot record which he equalled had in fact been set by Belvedere himself as an

undergradtiate nearly a generation before. If he had indeed been then in the status of a pupil, being also a self-con-fessed genius, it is unthinkable that he could not have graduated. In any case, we have his own word for it that he supervised his own studies after two weeks’ kindergarten. This slip, of course, could not of itself do much harm, It is the third blunder which I view most seridusly, ‘This comes right at the end of the picture, in the course of the college graduation ceremony, and the substance of the offence is that Mr, Belvedere is involved in the performance of what amounts to a miracle. Now, with all his genius, Mr. Belvedere is not Superman. Up to this point he had done nothing which could not in theory at least be achieved by one of his intellectual endowments (even the pole-vaulting, be it noted, was given a believable explanation). It is, indeed, of the very essence of the man that his most preposterous statements should be believable. If one character says, "The man’s a Houdini!" and Mr. Belvedere replies, acidly, "I taught Mr. Houdini," one laughs, but at the same time realises that someone presumably helped Houdini along in the first place. But no miracles, please. Let the conjurers and the magicians stay in the comic-strips, where they belong. Don’t, of course, run away with the idea that I didn’t enjoy Mr. Belvedere Goes to College. There’s a rather lugubrious side-plot involving a plumpfaced Shirley Temple and a juvenile romantic played by Tom Drake, and too much prominence is given to the fatuities of campus custom, but there’s still enough fun to leaven the whole. I am convinced, however, that Clifton Webb shines best when he has a good comedy foil playing with him-and a good story, of course, does help.