ODETTE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 25, Issue 630, 27 July 1951, Page 19

ODETTE

(London Films-Herbert Wilcox) HAVE so often found myself out of step with the whole monstrous regiment of filmgoers that, generally speaking, when I put my foot in it I no longer worry whether it’s the right foot or the left. This time, however, I have got to put both feet in at once and confess that, in the face of Command Performancés and capacity houses, Odette left me relatively unenthusiastic. It would at least be polite to say that my disappointment was not the fault of Anna Neagle, whose vitality’ and charm I respect, and whose fairy-tale adventures with Michael Wilding have so enriched the mythology of Mayfair; and I think that it is possible to be polite and honest. If the script of Odette had been what it should have been, if the direction had made more demands on the players (as it should have done) then she might have found her modest talent overtaxed. As it is, she emerges with as much credit as Trevor Howard, and a little more, I thought (considering their relative abilities), than Peter Ustinov. The fault (as so often happens) is not in the stars but in the scriptwriter (Jerrard Tickell), and the director (Herbert Wilcox). There is no doubt that these two had first-class material to work with. The story of Odette Churchill, G.C., who served for a time as a British agent in Occupied France, was captured by the Nazis, tortured by the Gestapo in an unsuccessful attempt to make her disclose her associates, and finally sent to solitary confinement in Ravensbruck concentration camp, is one of the heroic episodes of the cloak-and-dagger war. Being so, it deserves something, like heroic treatment. With true stories such as this, of course, there is a temptation (inadequately resisted here) to borrow force and drama from the fact that the story is true. The shock which should have been produced \in our minds by the direction, the photography, and the toil and sweat of the cast, is derived instead from the credits and the prologue (here spoken by Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of the organisation in which Odette served during the war). The most powerful element in the drama, in fact, comes from outside’ the film altogether. And there is a good. deal more that might be said against the direction and the script. Most of the time I felt as if, I, too, were on the outside looking inand that is not the effect a good film should produce. There is scarcely any photography which is worth calling subjective, hardly any attempt to identify the audience with the central character, to show us the Gestapo, say, as she saw them, or suggest what’ solitary confinement in a concentration camp could mean. For the most part her long ordeal is conveyed to us at second hand: sub-titles mark her progress from one prison to another, the treatment meted out to her is described in the dialogue of other characters. And. the particular horror of Ravensbruck is hardly communicated at all.

Artistically, Odette lacks style. More fundamentally, it demonstrates how troublesome "it can be, in handling a true story, to arrive at the essential truth, |