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Thackeray passages highlighted for the launching of Technicolor, Rouben Mamoulian uses blue and red and yellow felt-tip markers. From behind muted curtains emerges a girlish stampede, a farewell of music boxes and lachrymose verses for little miss priss (Frances Dee), her eponymous colleague (Miriam Hopkins) stands unimpressed on the wings. "Oh well, there's too much bad poetry in the world anyway." Ups and downs of "the young English gentlewoman," nanny, servant, debutante, wife, mistress, survivor. Friend's brother (Nigel Bruce), gambling husband (Alan Mowbray) and imposing nobleman (Cedric Hardwicke) are some of the moths around the heroine's flame. "You've got them eating out of your hand. But they may bite it later." A splash of historical comedy to set off the riot of Victorian pastels and rubicund skin, bows and frocks and scarlet coats in a dress rehearsal for the Old Masters hues of Blood and Sand. (Mamoulian sends up the monochromatic screen with silhouetted figures behind a pale sheet, "monstrous clever.") A Brussels ball before Napoleonic battle, Waterloo is dimly visible at night as rumbling cannons still the waltz, Becky watches the departing troops. "In an hour they'll be dying for their country. Well, I'm dying for my breakfast." Money and flower petals in close-up state the arrangement with the Marquis, "the seamy side" is a tavern in no mood for delicate songs. All of this is played on the high wire by Hopkins, whose gusto morphs tears into grins while munching on a peppermint stick. A beta prototype, the finished form is not Gone with the Wind but Preminger's Forever Amber. With Billie Burke, Alison Skipworth, G.P. Huntley Jr., William Stack, George Hassell, William Faversham, Colin Tapley, Doris Lloyd, and Elspeth Dudgeon.
--- Fernando F. Croce |