Fox tried something a bit different with this Sonja Henie vehicle - it's got really serious undertones, as two feuding reporters track down her father, who escaped from a concentration camp and faked his own death and is hiding out. They expose the dad and baddies come after hi.
I get the feeling this was envisioned as a non Henie movie - there's only a little bit of skating, and the one big number is a fantasy sequence. The roles for the reporters are prominent. I think the writers should have had the reporters know each other from the beginning - establish their rivalry, play it as Clark Gable-Spencer Tracy stuff... they waste too much time Bob Cummings and Ray Milland not knowing who they are.
Having said that, Milland and Cummings are strong leads and they have clear selfish courses of action. Henie is her normal smug self satisfied self. It is good to see this little Nazi sympathiser play someone fleeing the Nazis even though they're not named.
It's shot in a gloomy film noir style. Not a typical Henie vehicle at all. Some sequences seem abrupt like the final chase and I wish that there had been some baddy who got shot or arrested or something.
Both Cummings and Milland fall for Henie and you never know which one she prefers. At the end she's on a boat with her dad and Cummings with Milland stuck behind.. but even then you get the impression Henie really wants a menage a trois.
There's some gentle teasing at the dullness of life in a Swiss town. This was to be invaluable shortly!
No comments:
Post a Comment