COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 732, 24 July 1953, Page 18

COME BACK, LITTLE SHEBA

(Paramount) HIRLEY BOOTH’S performance as the slatternly housewife in Come Back, Little Sheba, a film adaptation of William Inge’s Broadway play, is as fine a piece of acting as we are likely to see on the screen for some time. She plays with comp'ete absorption and restraint the part of a woman who has seen the best years of life pass by leaving her middle-aged, childless and disappointed. She seems lost in the aimlessness of her marriage to a man (played by Burt Lancaster) whose own frustrations: and. disappointment, linked with hers, have turned him into an alcoholic. These years of their married life, which, she says, have "just vanished," are symbolised in her imagination by the memory of her pet dog, Sheba, which one day ran away and has never come back. Yet out of such sombre material she has created a screen personality of intense vitality and sly humour. Her sloppy, untidy clothes, the lack of interest in housekeeping which makes her incapable even of getting her husband’s breakfast before he goes to work, are amusingly contrasted at the beginning of the film with his own quiet uprightness and neat pride. He has been cured of his alcoholism and has not had a drink for a year, but his temporary recovery is destroyed by the arrival of a pretty young co-ed from the university (Terry Moore), who becomes a boarder in the house. In his fear that the girl will be unable to resist the attentions of a wolfish fellow student (Richard Jaeckel), and will repeat the empty pattern of his own married life, he breaks out again, abuses and threatens his wife in his drunkenness, and has to be sent to the hospital for a second cure. The resolution of this dramatic situation is worked out en fairly conventional lines, and it is in the early part of the film that the main interest lies. The gradual: revelation of the real tragedy behind the lives of this couple, and the parallel deveiopment, achieved with great subtlety by Shirley Booth, of the character of Lola Delaney, has been

very skilfully done, The play has been more than usually weil adapted to the screen by its director, Daniel Mann.