LITTLE BOY LOST

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 760, 12 February 1954, Page 18

LITTLE BOY LOST

(Paramount) ENTIMENTALITY is a rather distasteful weakness, and I like to think I’m no more sentimental than the next man, but when children sufferwell, no film has moved me more than Germany, Year Zero, and that’s the sort of thing that, as a reviewer, I have to allow for. I didn’t expect Little Boy Lost to be another Germany, Year Zero, and it isn’t; but looking at it as dispas-. sionately as I could, and with a somewhat more case-hardened colleague beside me, I found it a moving little film which will assuredly set many people a-swallowing. The little lost boy of the film, which is based on Marghanita Laski’s novel, is the son of an American news broadcaster named Wainwright (Bing Crosby) and a French radio singer named Lisa (Nicole Maurey), who have been separated by war. Lisa is shot as a member of the Resistance, and four years after the liberation of Paris Wainwright is still looking for the child. Perhaps Jean (Christian Fourcade), whom he finds in an orphanage, is his son-but how can he be sure? Little Boy Lost isn’t a masterpiece; in one or two places it drags a little, and at least one of Bing’s songs, during a boat ride at the zoo, is obtrusive. (I think little Jean thought so, too, and showed his discomfort in a remarkably natural way.) But the film has much charm and some suspense, and doesn’t founder in the sentimentality one expects with a story of this sort. The director, George Seaton, has chosen good locations, in Paris and in the village where the orphanage scenes are set-these help to give the film a freshness it wouldn’t have if it had been shot in America. And he has got some first-class performances from the cast. Christian Fourcade, with big sad eyes and shaggy hair, is as lost and pathetic and engaging a little boy as you could hope to find in a film; and when he clutches a pair of gloves-his very first present-or produces them from under his pillow like a talisman, he gives much depth to the character, and adds a mute comment on the aftermath of war. Among other French players, Georgette Anys is probably more convincing than anyone else in the film, as an old

washerwoman who has been helping to smuggle children to the orphanage during the occupation, and Gabrielle Dorziat is a more than adequate Mother Superior. Mr. Crosby, of course, strolls about as relaxed as you like-well, most of the time-showing once again that he can act agreeably, even if you think he can’t sing.