L'Automobile est Mobile

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 551, 13 January 1950, Page 11

L'Automobile est Mobile

] RECOMMEND "Car of Death" (2YD, Tuesday, December 28) to all those listeners who like their yet well hung. Actually the Passing Parade people achieve an even riper effect with less recent material, but it’s amazing what they can do with events of comparative freshness, "Car of Death" is the name given by the authors to the sixseater red sedan in which the Archduke Ferdinand was riding when he was assassinated. Thereafter it became harbinger or agent of death for all its owners. First the Austrian general who comman-

deers it loses a vital battle and is hustled into a mental hospital, subsequent owners commit suicide, are killed in accidents, ‘or file petitions of banktuptcy. For one owner the vehicle, havine apparently

conceived an illogical fondness for him, refuses to start. The car, in spite of the prowess with which it demolishes younger and stouter models with never a scratch itself, gets a bad name, but no enterprising dealer thinks of painting it black or filing off the engine number. One owner, in fact (a victim surely of Scriptwriter’s Inertia), goes so far as to advertise for a chauffeur to drive "a red six-seater sedan," and gets no replies./It is not till 1927 that "its evil purpose accomplished" the car is destroyed and "its influence ended for ever." But I find myself wishing that the scriptwriter had given us as many details of its death as of its life. There is possibly a special ritual to be observed (as with vampires) in destroying a vehicle possessed by evil influences. Who knows but what road accidents today may not be caused by the incorporation in later models of spare parts from the original Red Terror? Warm and Human HERE was a strong suggestion of going to town about the scriptwriter’s approach to the NZBS feature programme They Cante To Stay. It was somebody’s big chance, and determination to make the most of it led to a cer-

tain exuberance of phrase-a tendency to refer to New Zealand as The Land of the Long White Cloud. The narrator too was more than anxious to do. justice to the lovingly-fashioned sentiments entrusted to him, and adopted from start to finish the Grand Manner and the organ voice, appropriate tribute perhaps to the importance of the subject. But for all that it was a good programme, a warm and human programme. The D.P.’s spoke for themselves, some in the stumbling laboured English gained in their eight weeks’ tuition at Pahiatua, cthers with the lilting fluency of previous acquaintance. They ‘told their stories unemotionally, stories of husbands murdered and children lost, or perhaps just stories of finding one’s feet in a strange and alien country. But they told them with deadly effect, And their simplicity and sincerity took away some of the desk-made flavour from phrases about "this country where opposition is _an expression of personal belief, not a passport to eternity,’ and illuminated |

ther essential validity.

M.

B.