VIVID PICTURING OF EDISON.

Evening Post, Volume CXXX, Issue 72, 21 September 1940, Page 14

VIVID PICTURING OF EDISON.

Majestic Attraction.

"Edison, the Man"—a Spencer Tracy picture not to be confused with the Mickey Rooney picture "Young Tom Edison"—is one of the best offerings of the year, ranking in merit with Robert Donat's "Good-bye Mr. Chips.". Critics who find their language taxed in an effort to apologise for mediocre pictures also find their language overtaxed when they try to pay tribute to the quality of "Edison, the Man," for to over-praise this Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer achievement would be difficult. A recent preview in the Majestic Theatre confirmed golden opinions from abroad. Director Clarence Brown might have been tempted to make the story of the adult Edison an exclusively laboratory story, but he has resisted that temptation, although there is sufficient laboratory and inventive interest in the- picture to delight lovers of popular mechanics. The director might also have been tempted to make the story all-science if not alllaboratory. Again he has resisted the temptation; instead, 'his world audiences are indebted to him for showing the impact of science on all human life, both ' constructively through economics and destructively through war. The result is a vivid, life-like picture of Edison's manysided career—a picture with a social and international meaning. ~ As he pursues his great, throbbing, human theme in its masculine surroundings, the director finds time in passing to make his bow to love, and provides Edison with a wonderful wife in Rita Johnson. But Spencer Tracy, as Edison, is the backbone of a picture full of human types, and gives a sterling performance challenging Robert Donat in "Good-b3-o Mr. Chips." Sabotaged by blackmailing commercial rivals, who fight- his electrical enterprises both above and below ground. Edison battles on towards the higher light—that is to say. to the electric light, whose birth as a filamented, vacuum lamp is full of dramatic thrill. The first showing of "Edison the Man" at the Majestic Theatre on Friday next, will constitute a film event of no small importance.