THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 894, 21 September 1956, Page 15

THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT

(20th Century-Fox) Y’ Cert. SEVERAL things built up my con-sumer-resistance to The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. I had ploughed through the book, then I was late at the booking-office, and found myself rubbernecking at the wide screen from the front stalls, like a fan in the bleachers at Wimbledon. To make matters more uncomfortable, the supporting © bill offered one indifferent newsreel, and two filmed advertisements. There’s. nothing, I suppose, that one can do about the latter except scream impotently, but .f hereby affirm that I am now boycotting one make of cigarette, one brand of chocolates, and a wave-setting lotion. Caveat vendor! Faced, after all that, with something like two and three-quarter miles of De Luxe-coloured CinemaScope (and nary a yard of gray flannel, so far as I could see), I was surprised to find the efforts of Darryl Zanuck, Nunnally Johnson, Fredric March and Gregory Peck holding my attention as they did. This is, I think, most immediately to the credit of Nunnally Johnson, who scripted as well as directed the production, If he hasn’t kept the footage down he has at least cut back the story to a more credible and creditable pattern of behaviour, something a little closer to our own experience than the novel was. The problems of the hero, Tommy Rath, are solved in the film by his innate predisposition to honesty rather than by the prospect of a sizeable killing on the realestate market, as the book (unintentionally, perhaps) suggested. , Tom’s problems, like those of the characters in Wyler’s. The Best Years of Our Lives, are problems of adjustment. Ten years after the war, in which he served as a paratrooper, he is still toting a load of guilt and remorse-the men he killed, the girl he left in Italy, the child he may have fathered there. It’s none the less real because it may be commonplace, and for once we get it hére without the overtones of hysteria which usually accompany it on the screen. For once, too, Gregory Peck’s impassivity serves him well. He speaks his lines with an unaccustomed conviction, and

with his general look of troubled solemnity this all fits the part rather well. Tom Rath, in fact, is Walter Mitty in_ reverse-troubled by the reality’ of past | violent action, anxious only to achieve'’a | safe anonymity, worried by his wife’s unconcealed dissatisfaction with him. Of. course, things do work out well in the | end for them both-and, as I have said, | more creditably to them than in the) original story-but I would have liked | it more clearly emphasised that honesty was good in itself and not simply the | best policy in a materialistic world. | The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit is, | of course, far too long at 14,000 feet; I | was numbed before it finished. One or | two of the players-notably Fredric | March and Marisa Pavan — perform | really well; in contrast with Jenifer Jones, who emotes unbearably. But what | piqued my interest most was the general contrast in quality between the flashback scenes of war and those devoted to what was variously described as the rat-race or the chromium jungle of commercial TV. Of the two, the war seemed more real and at times a lot more meaningful.