MY BROTHER JONATHAN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 546, 9 December 1949, Page 13

MY BROTHER JONATHAN

(BEF-Associated British) WO British films this weekneither of them out of the top drawer, but both competent pieces of picture-making that offer a lively contrast in method and subject matter. My Brother Jonathan, after the novel by Francis Brett Young, is the virtuous tale of a doctor who gives up a brilliant career in order to put his sporting brother through Cambridge. From reel one to reel ten he plods his ngble, self-sacrificing way through the usual quota of births, deaths, and other domestic crises, a walking model of rectitude and a credit to the B.M.A. On the other hand, Good Time Girl makes capital out’ of vice by depicting the degradation of a young sybarite who gets involved in a lot of backalley skullduggery in Soho-a_ viscous piece of narrative told as a cautionary moral tale by a city magistrate to a ‘would-be offender. The stuff of My Brother Jonathan is familiar enough. Michael Denison as Jonathan is the clever elder son of one of ‘those eccentric English familfes, His father isa big bearded Robert Browning of a man, a poet manque forced to_become a corset salesman to keep house and home together, who wastes all his savings in a worthless mine and then gets himself run over, leaving Jonathan half-way to becoming a surgeon but without the cash to complete. Of course he does the décent thing and_ reluctantly stows away his surgeon’s knife to help young Hal (Ronald Howard, recognisable by his face, if not his acting, as his father’s.son) by immuring himself in a small industrial town in the Midlands. Here he becomes the partner of an old doctor, rather run to seed, who is played with a fine flourish by Finlay Currie, the convict of Great Expectations. Not unexpectedly handsome Hal meanwhile wins the girl whom Jonathan has always been in love with, but then War (1914 style) comes, and one by one the various knots of the story disentangle themselves until virtue finally triumphs as it must. After an uncertain start My Brother Jonathan produces some solid acting, by Denison in particular, yet there is little in it that hasn’t ‘been done better in

pictures like South Riding, Cavalcade or The Citadel. The young doctor putting his duty to the poor before self and the fleshpots, saving lives nobly_in workirig men’s hovels whilé he fights the corrupt hospital committee and that villainous other doctor across the street; the thrill as he finally defeats them, and the drama of his love for ‘the Other Girl; the cricket matches, Kitchener posters on the wall, and lavish balls in gay, prewar London-it is all true to type, as nostalgic, patriotic, and sentimental to our eyes as a picture postcard of the Union Jack floating over Buckingham Palace. It is a workmanlike job that suffers most, like all pattern pieces, from not going deeply enough into its material. :