NORMA SHEARER’S ART.

Waikato Times, Volume 116, Issue 19451, 15 December 1934, Page 17 (Supplement)

NORMA SHEARER’S ART.

CHARLES LAUGHTON’S SKILL. “BARRETTS OF WIMPOLE STREET." FILM MAKES GREAT IMPRESSION. The film of the week is the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production, "The Barretts of Wlmpole Street,” says a London writer. Nobody who saw the Hardwiclce-Ffrangoon-Davies production of the play in London could have supposed that it would make so good a film. The mld-Viotorian milieu helps—the ' glimpses of Wimpole Street and the park are quite beautifully in period. But, finally, one is forced to agree that Norma Shearer and Charles Laughton act the play to success, with much less help from the camera than most films demand. ' The Browning story need not trouble us very much. Frederic March is obyiously, not Robert Browning, and Norman Shearer, though she reaches an intelligent mid-Victorianism, is almost certainly not the authoress of “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” Nor, for that matter, is she a woman who has been confined for years to a sickroom. Fascinating Love Story.

Yet how easy it is to brush these doubts aside when the action is launched! A very simple yet fascinating love-story is' unfolded against a background of inexorable parental tyranny, and it really, does not matter very much that Elizabeth’s charming corkscrew curls are a trifle over-immacu-late, or that she probably never penned a line of verse in her life. The feature —if so well-balanced a film can be said to have such a thing—is, of course, Charles Laughtpn’s admirable picture of Edward MoullonBarrett. This is melodrama if you will —the stern parent who dates back to Jessica’s father and beyond, raised to the nth power of unctuous cruelty by Laughton’s uncanny skill in unpleasant suggestion. But it is an individual study of a warped psychology as well, and, strangely enough, it is at his most repulsive moments that Barrett is most convincing and real.

Beauty and Ugliness. Set against Elizabeth’s pellucid sincerity and clarity of mind —Miss Shearer is really beautiful in the part —the grim pseudo-austerity bred of repression which dominates Edward Barrett’s character is as impressive as it is ugly. “Flush,” the faithful spaniel of Elizabeth, is brilliantly used. Animals on the stage are usually a nuisance if anything like a play is going on. Sidney Franklin shows how, in a film, an animal’s -reactions to people and events can be made to reinforce -the drama,

Instead of dissipating it in silly-sym-pathetic “oo’s” and “ah’s.” “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” was played in Hamilton a few years ago by a company headed by Margaret Rawlings.