BAROMETER
OVERCAST: "Man in the Attic." OVERCAST: "His Majesty O'Keefe." +
ten years ago, with Laird Cregar in the title role, and such celebrities as Sir Cedric Hardwicke, George Saunders and Merle Qberon as supporting players) then Hugo Fregonese, who directed the current opus, has shown remarkably little originality. The Bonners (they were the Buntings in the novel) who let their attic to the stranger have been substantially upgraded in the social scale. No longer retired servants gnawing the dry bread of penniless respectability, they have an impressive home, keep a servant, dress for the theatre, and possess a niece whose uninhibited talents on the music-hall stage have found approval in the most Exalted Quarters. You might say that the real mystery in this story is why Mrs. B. took in a lodger at all. Photographically, the presentation is equally uninspired. Apart from the theatre sequences (which give us something approximately like an audience of the 1880’s on one side of the footlights and a fair simulacrum of a Stork Club floor-show on the other), the settings are routine. The murky cobbled streets, narrow lanes and cul-de-sacs, the fog curling conveniently about knee-level, the comical London bobbies, the occasional posses of mounted police, the figure in the shadows, the door about to open--all the old tricks are used over again. The dialogue -coruscates with anachronisms-the police inspector, for example, greets his Commissioner with a brisk "Hallo, Chief,’ and the actress ecstatically announces that "All the reviews are raves." But of all the incongruities, the most incongruous is the casting of Jack Palance as the lodger. With that battered mug, those jug-ears, that impacted profile, he just couldn’t have avoided suspicion. Friday would have booked him on a 242 without a second thought. I know that Mrs. Belloc Lowndes described the lodger as having a worn, gaunt face (because I checked on it), but I’m sure she had in mind nothing so worn, or so far gaunt as this one.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19541029.2.29.1.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 16
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328BAROMETER New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 797, 29 October 1954, Page 16
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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