TWO PLUS TWO MAKE THREE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 937, 26 July 1957, Page 30

TWO PLUS TWO MAKE THREE

| 1984 (Associated British-Holliday) A Cert. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two. make four. If that is granted, all else follows. : ITTING here contemplating the almost vacant page I have just had the slightly unnerving feeling that, by some dislocation of time and space, old George Orwell is, in __ big-brotherly fashion, watching me. It isn’t a comfortable feeling at all, because I have already decided to recommend-at least to serious filmgoers-a production which

has taken Orwell’s own two-plus-two theorem and, by a process of concealed subtraction, made it add up to three. This motion-picture is "freely adapted" (the makers admit it themselves) from Orwell’s novel, but the freedom which they have taken is the freedom to corrupt the text, to compound with conscience, to reject the uncompromising pessimism of the book, to betray -there is no other word for it-Orwell’s own picture of the ultimate betrayal. But half a loaf-even when the flour is adulterated-is better than no bread, and it is true, too, that the film is faithful in small things. It reflects the drab grey world of Airstrip One much as Orwell envisaged it-though I felt that the pressure of budgetary economies rather than any particular inspiration in the art department was responsible for this. The art director also deserves a black mark for passing police uniforms which look like cheap fancy-dress (yet which remind one of the much more ominous outriders of death in Cocteau’s Orphée), and for an Inner Party uniform which makes Michael Redgrave look like a regional commander of the Salvation Army. I could say, too, that Edmond O’Brien is too full in face and figure to fit comfortably into the lean hide of Winston Smith, the Outer Partymember whose dangerous thoughts are the prime movers in the drama. But that would, I think, go beyond reasonable criticism. O’Brien satisfied me at almost all points of his performance, and that was a shade more than Michael Redgrave achieved. He, perhaps, because he is not allowed much scope, does not quite realise Orwell’s horrifying vision of the torturer-redeemer. (Hawkins came closer to it in The Prisoner.) In the white corridors of the Ministry of Love, on the threshhold of Room 101, it is the American’s face that purges one with pity and with terror. For, as we remember, the smell of 1984 is still in the air-men still babble their admissions of guilt in public forums, still thank their persecutors for savipg them from greater error. The merit of 1984

(director, Michael Anderson) is that it reminds us of what these displays mean, and for that alone it should be seen even if it balks at the last hurdle. And when you have seen the film, read the book again. I hope it scares you stiff.