NOT AS A STRANGER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 872, 20 April 1956, Page 18

NOT AS A STRANGER

(Stanley Kramer Pictures Corp.) VER since I suffered a partial blackout at a screening of Men in White in a suburban picturedrome on Whit Monday, 36 (it was that confounded wheezing football bladder that did it), I have tried to steer clear of Hollywood’s more clinical melodramas and to avoid acquaintance with those people who will tell one all about their operations. But it’s not so easy to ignore Stanley Kramer as it was to avoid young Dr. Kildare or old Dr. Barrymore. Regard me, then, coked to the gills on dramamine, toeing the line of duty at the Wellington premiére of Not as a Stranger in conditions which I could not but regard as inauspicious. It was one of those Wellington evenings-too wet to go out without a coat and too warm to wear one; the theatre was packed, humidity was high, ice-cream cones were disintegrating on every hand, and the air was full of the pervasive odour of vanilla. Feeling queasy? So was I. I felt a little more so (this, you will gather, is a highly personalised account of the seance) when the Censor’s Certi-

ficate. revealed that the line of duty was going to stretch out for 12,500 feet, Nor had we to wait long for Mr. Kramer to show his hand. The film opens with a deceptively quiet shot of a long hospital corridor; orderlies appear wheeling a sheeted trolly. It approaches, comes to rest. Broderick Crawford moves into the shot (white-smocked, skull-capped): "Gentlemen . . . this is a corpse." A hackneyed opening? I suppose it is, but to be hit low the belt with a cliché doesn’t make it any more comfortable. If you remain sufficiently detached to recall the Censor’s Certificate, you will understand why it was a "Special A-Unsuitable for. Children.’ Adults whose imaginations are stronger than their stomachs will doubtless be able to decide for themselves whether it is suitable for them, For Mr. Kramer doesn’t spare the realism. Those anaesthesiometer bladders puff and blow in every other sequence, X-rays click on and off to reveal safety-pins in the bronchi of adventurous infants, hypodermics squirt, fresher students keel over and the dialogue is enlivened by such evocative lines as "We will make a vertical midline incision. . ." The piece de résistance is, I suppose, an emergency cardiac operation with a big close-up of the human heart seen through what looks like a

foot-square hole cut in the rib-cage-a shot which affected me as strongly as the bulging screen and throbbing pulse in the first act of Olivier’s screen Hamlet, though scarcely to such good purpose. As Dr. Broderick Crawford says in his opening remarks, "For some of you this will be unpleasant." But at least I can claim that I survived. There were moments when I found it more comfortable to remove my thoughts elsewhere, but I didn’t once,slide under the seat in something like two and a half hours. And what did\I get for my pains? A great quantity of technically excellent, and frequently dramatic movie-photo-graphy by Frank Planer-with an occasional severe ‘spiritual buffeting in’ the big close-ups; good acting by such supporting players as Crawford, Olivia de Havilland, Frank Sinatra, and the veteran Charles Bickford; and an emotional / vacuum in the area occupied by Robert Mitchum, the nominal star. Mitchum is ! a. big man, but to me he registers little more than bulk. Because of this central _weakness-and a brief passage of ludicrous symbolism that turns one of the more melodramatic interludes into farce -the film itself comes close to meriting same criticism, It is saved by the | minor players, by the photography, and, _I suppose, by the rough ruthlessness of Mr. Kramer. But I would have liked it better at half the length. ; seas