NEW OPERA HOUSE

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 141, 9 March 1940, Page 7

NEW OPERA HOUSE

"Katin,” anglicized as "Catherine,” is the name of the very moving, well-acted French film al the New Uperu House this week. Danielle Darrieux and John Loder play the leading parts. As is usual when the French make a film, the story, though slight, is made arresting by vivid acting and deceptivelysimple technique. Danielle Darrieux, as Princess Catherine Dolguaulsy, puts a sparkling, slightly fey, quality into the part, as if she were really living it, and John Loder neatly and effectively plays up to her. Simply told, the story is about a rather tomboyish young princess whose lively uuconventionality charms the young Tsar Alexander while he is visithig in the country. At. tlie time she is uo more than a child, but she interests him so strangely that she impresses herself iu his memory. A few years later, when Alexander’s duties take him on a tour of a finishing school, he finds Catherine, though she has been hidden in the back row of the excited young women, and takes her off for a drive. ' Her pleasing, puckish impudence attracts him more than ever, and he realizes that they are falling in love with each other. The next step down their lover's lime is Catherine's formal presentation at a court ball, and her discovery of Alexander’s ailing wife. Indiscretion soon becomes open scandal, but the two lovers remain faithful to each other over tlie years till the opportunity comes to them to marry. How fate thwarts their plans for a prosperous, happy future after a short, exstatic marriage is a part of the story that the film must tell for itself. It is enough to say that it is thoroughly in keeping with what has gone before.