OPERA HOUSE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 84, Issue 190, 14 August 1940, Page 7

OPERA HOUSE

“MY SON, MY SONI’’ Howard Spring’s novel, "O Absalom!” enjoyed such success that it has now been turned into a United Artists film, produced by Edward Small, and the result of the adaptation, under the title of "My Son, My Son!” is to be shown at the Opera House on Friday, there being no pictures to-night and to-morrow night. It is an unusual picture, of strong dramatic and character interest. William Essex, who wants to be a .writer, reaches manhood in the slums of Manchester. He determines that when he has raised himself out of these surroundings his son shall have everything he lacked. And he works into g,ve ins sou just those things. The baker’s shop in Manchester in which he works gives way to a suburban villa, to a south coast manor, and the habits of an ambitious writer, toiling over his books in the time taken from his work in the kitchen, are replaced by the assured ways of an established author with a fertile imagination, writing book alter book in order that his son may have the things which were denied to his father. The story of how that son repaid this devotion, how he deceived his father in childhood, established himself by cheating and deceit, and finally laid waste the lives of those around him, is tellingly shown. The film is enriched by a striking piece of acting by Brian Aherne as William Essex, though Louis Hayward, as his fluent and self-possessed little bounder of a son (“able to lie his way out of anything”), almost steals the honours from eyeryone. Madeleine Carroll is cast as the young artist who brings love to Essex for the first time.