THE CAPTAIN’S PARADISE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 782, 16 July 1954, Page 16

THE CAPTAIN’S PARADISE

(London Films-Anthony Kimmins) T’S absurd," says Captain Henry St. James, "to think that the woman who comes home with the groceries can also come home with the milk." All his life Henry (Alec Guinness) has sought the secret of happiness and at Gibraltar one day the gates of Paradise open. He buys a ship and starts her on the short run across to North Africaone night with the woman who carries the groceries (Celia Johnson), one with the girl who comes home with the milk (Yvonne de Carlo) and, in between, the company of men, with the clash of intellects to stimulate the mind. This is the idea around which Alec Coppel has written the story of The Captain’s Paradise. It’s a good one, and Anthony Kimmins has turned it into a good film. With so much shuttling back and forth it could have become monotonous, but it never does, partly, at least, because it shuttles also between past and present. It’s full of amusing situations, the best of which-the captain’s first Gibraltar homecoming, for example, and an unexpected visit from his first officer-are very funny indeed.

As you'll imagine Mr. Guinness has all the qualities Captain St. James needs, and he has a good first officer in Charles Goldner. Miss de Carlo and Miss Johnson are equally well cast as the two halves of a man’s needs, and they are

quite credible in their changed roles when the path of bigamy-if that’s what you call it-no longer runs smoothly. With so much to praise, what can I say, then, of my faint uneasiness about this film-a sort of all-is-not-well feeling here and there-which I have neither managed to shake off nor completely explain? It has something to do, I think, with a very unsophisticated (but not, I hope, uncivilised) weakness where homicide is concerned-a weakness which took some of the edge off my enjoyment of even such a masterpiece as Kind Hearts and Coronets. Was anyone else, I wonder, a little troubled by the off-stage murder in The Captain’s Paradise? And not unrelated to this point, in this film, is another, for raising which I shall probably lose my head. When the virtuous thug-if you know what I mean-can have his fling, why must the transgressor who loves life too much remain in chains? "Why couldn’t they let him get away with it?" a friend remarked when Mr. Guinness stood to reveal his handcuffs at the efd of The Lavender Hill Mob. And, laying my head on the block, I ask the same question about the bighearted genius who in the new Guinness film builds a stairway to heaven.