“The Barretts” as a Film

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18589, 27 December 1934, Page 13

“The Barretts” as a Film

THE, love story of Robert Browning * has already provided Mr Rudolf Besier with' a successful play, and “The Barretts of. Wimpole Street,” in the Screen version, look's as if it may achieve a greatly extended popularity. Charles Laughton, with iron-grey hair .and'bushy side-whiskers, plays the original' Hardwicke part of Edward Moulton-Barrett—archetype of tinstern Victorian parent whose harsh autocracy threatens to wreck the lives of (his "children,/ and Miss Norma Shearer is Elizabeth.

Miss Shearer has never played better, and the conflicts between the two Personalities, which end so happily for the poetess in her elopement with Browning, provide some brilliantly dramatic sequences. Frederic March is. rather less happily cast as the robust, tempestuous young man who bursts into the stuffy sickroom to bring health and hope to the languishing invalid. It is, in fact, Laughton’s evening, and he plays the ogr* with all the force and insinuating cruelty which one knows him to command —not. shrinking from full implications of the old man’s twisted, thwarted nature. A certain subtlety which belonged to the play is lost, but the resulting melodrama stib makes one of the best films from America for some time.

A beautiful little piece of acting by Una O’Connor as a conspiratorial maid, and some passionate outbursts from Maureen O’Sullivan as Elizabeth’s sister add to the evening. Finally there is the spaniel “Flush,” “produced” with something like genius to point, every situation with his more than human expressiveness.