![]() ![]() Significantly, Lana Turner, who plays the arrogant sister in the piece, changes her costumes much more frequently than the expression on her immature face. And it is performed, under Victor Saville's direction, in a manner consistent with the type. Not until the fade-out is it determined that Marguerite will be a nun and that Marianne has finally got her fellow with "all the warmth and glory-all the passion-" of true love.But, long before that inevitability, it is obvious that "Green Dolphin Street" is just a glamorized illustration of a turgid adventure yarn, dressed up in stiff, expensive costumes and spangled with scenic effects. And, back home in the Channel island, there is Marguerite with a sorely anguished heart, a dying mother and father and a troubled yearning to become a nun.In fact, pretty much of the novel has been telescoped into the film, with a slight elaboration of a minor character and a noticeable switch at the end. There's a bloody Maori uprising and a ticklish escape from brutal death. ![]() There's an earthquake so violent and noisy that it literally shakes the theatre, in the midst of which Marianne gives birth to a child with but primitive aid. Wilson has arranged on the screen-a purely mechanical criss-cross of windy emotional episodes, of bravely fantastic adventures and overpowering acts of God, all quite as glib and fortuitous as that fateful "slip of the pen."All sorts of terrible things happen when clever and willful Marianne goes out to New Zealand to marry the lad whom her gentle sister loves. For Miss Goudge arranged on paper-and Mr. Don't expect any resemblance to anything but an ingenious novelist's dreams. Yet that is the nature of the romance which Miss Goudge elaborately conceived in her wildly imaginative story and which Carey Wilson has generously transcribed into motion-picture image and action, now showing at Loew's Criterion.Don't expect reason and temperance in this plush and romantic masquerade. It does seem a bit pathetic that most of the turbulence which occurs in Elizabeth Goudge's capacious and overdressed novel, "Green Dolphin Street"-and in the two-hour-and-nineteen-minute movie which Metro has made therefrom-should be the chain-action consequence of a "mere slip of the pen," the result of a drunken suitor writing to ask for Marguerite and naming Marianne. ![]()
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