BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 552, 20 January 1950, Page 24

BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE

| (Korda-London Films) | WONDER how a full-blooded Highlander would react to this film.. My own reaction (from one of mixed Scottish and English /ancestry) was delight at its col- | ourful re-enactment of the old leg"end, and sorrow that the whole expensive | production was not as competently done | as some of its parts. For it seems that the_ill-luck of the Stuarts has dogged |even the makers of this ambitious ac/count of their attempt to regain the | British throne. In the first place David Niven is either miscast or badly directed | in the title role. It may not be altogether his fault, but his seems a blood- ' less performance for such a romantic personality as the Royal Charlie of song, _whose one appearance in Scotland set the heather ablaze and the clans roll/ing across the border in the Jacobite

Rebellion of 1745. The best part of the film by far is the final escape sequence, filmed amid the magnificent scenery of the Highlands. The earlier parts are not so good. In his wordy battles with Murray, the Scottish general, the Prince does not altogether shine, though our sympathies are with him. To attack London or not? Who was right, anyway? Though the implications favour the Prince, the handling of the episode of that bitter retreat is-too confused to make anything clear. The same sketchiness prevails in the attempts to 'show how he charmed the lords® and _ladies of Edinburgh. He may have been a Prince Charming indeed, but ,charm _can be a weak thing in some peapie’s hands. | Perhaps the subject was too big for one film, yet Clemence Dane's script is lacklustre too. The picture is built up (except for the escape). from a number of static tableaux, in themselves picturesque and often exciting, but without, when linked, the dynamic flow that inspiration lends to a great story. There . ;

is too much explanation, and the dialogue is sometimes stilted and banal, as if the writer was overawed at the immensity of her subject. The same could be said of Anthony Kimmins’s directjon. Too many fine effects are spoilt by obtuse handling. What remains? Miraculously, a good deal; a kind of faded glory that emphasises the hopelessness of a lost cause. For me, the star of the film is Margaret Leighton as Flora Macdonald. She does not appear until late in the story, but every scene with her in it is infused with a new virility and meaning; and she breathes a living fire into Niven’s Princg in a way those coldly magnificent scenes of battle and ballroom do not. But the real triumph of the film is in

the richly suggestive background against which the personal drama is played out --and this despite. a numbem:of obviously studio, sets. The fine exteriors were photographed in technicolour by Osmond Borrodaile, although Robert Krasker gets the main screen credit. And they, with the minor characters, are some of the best things in the film. There is Finlay Currie as the crag-like -Tullibardine, Jack Hawkins as Lord George Murray (what a fine picture of self-confident arrogance), Morland Graham as Donald the Shepherd, and a host more of nameless players, Highlandfighting men and chiefs and their wives. I cannot vouch for the accuracy of details of 18th Century Scottish life, but they are said to have been meticulously represented, even to the extent of making a hundred sets of bagpipes fitted with the two drones of the period. A fourth person affected the film, to an extent we cannot imagine, by his absence. Will Fyffe, the Dundee comedian, died in its making and every scene _in which he appeared (in the original role of Donald) had to be retaken. This may explain some of the picture’s lifelessness, for those re-shot scenes make up much of the earlier part of the film. It’s an irksome thought. How much better might the film have been if. Will Fyffe had been there to quicken the pulse of history with his drollery?