HOUSE OF LOST WOMEN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 777, 11 June 1954, Page 22

HOUSE OF LOST WOMEN

(Romulus-20th Century Fox) IKE No Room at the Inn, which caused a mild furore when it was shown here in 1950, House of Lost

Women draws its melodrama from the exploitation of the helpless, The disillusioned might say that it simply exploits the exploitation of the helpless, but I don’t want to be quite so cynical as that-at least not yet. I am prepared to concede a_ reasonable measure of serious intent and social conscience to any studio which presents a story as seamy and sordid as this one (however the exhibitors may promote it), My criticism of House of Lost Women is that the story. isn’t told with enough skill and conviction to produce the necessary suspension of disbelief. I am, of course, aware that there have been (and no doubt still are) women as_ vicious and conscienceless as the baby-farming Mrs. Allistair and that young unmarried girls are their principal victims, but in spite of a virtuoso performance by Freda Jackson (she was also the infamous Mrs. Voray of No Room at the Inn), I

did not find my emotions engaged. And if my reaction was merely a dim and conventional regret that such things should be, that was perhaps because the story is given a rather conventional format. The girls at No. 4 Albion Road are too neat a collection of classified types to be inherently convincing-the nice girl, the blowsy tough, the sophisticate down on her: luck, ‘the D.P., the flirt, the weakminded slavey: they are like the characters in’a morality play. Even Freda Jackson, skilful as she is, can’t quite make Mrs. Allistair three-dimensional. House of Lost Women should purge our minds with pity, but something, has gone wrong with the prescription.