CURRENT & CHOICE: New Picture, Oct. 9, 1944

Frenchman’s Creek (Paramount) is a minor masterpiece of mush. A color-drenched $4,000,000 cinemadaptation of Daphne du Maurier’s best-seller laid in 17th-Century England (TIME, Feb. 2, 1942), it offers male cinemaddicts little for their money except innumerable coyly brazen veilings and half-unveilings of Joan Fontaine’s Restoration bosom, and a startling scene in which Miss Fontaine, alone in a dress-parade nightgown, frisks and flops about on her marshmallowy bed like a titillated tarpon. But to judge by the gasps, oofs, titters and low moans of the audience which stuffed Manhattan’s Rivoli Theater on the opening day, the picture may well hurdle a lukewarm press to become the woman’s wow of the year.

If it does, there will be two good reasons: 1) Paramount, under the supervision of Designer Raoul Pene du Bois, has turned Miss du Maurier’s novel into one of the most eye-drugging jobs of costuming and color on record; 2) the story disguises an essentially drab little suburban flirtation as high romance, retaining the most sure-fire features of both.

Dona St. Columb, though of the 17th-century English noblesse, has a soul the simplest of women will understand. Love’s tide has ebbed, leaving her stranded high & dry with two children and a dim flibbertigibbet of a husband (Ralph Forbes) who seems almost to encourage his wolfish crony Lord Rockingham (Basil Rathbone) to lick his chops at her. Dona is sick of London’s mad social whirl, sick, sick, as she tells her husband, of “the stupid futile life we lead here.” Finally, one dawn, she packs up and flounces off with her children to their country estate on the Cornish coast.

In Cornwall, the miracle happens. Her new butler William (Cecil Kellaway) has a friend and master hiding in the vicinity who has been using her bed and building fancies about her portrait. This vagabond lover (Arturo de Cordova) is a Frenchman with a taste for Ronsard, tabac and sketching seabirds. He is also wonderfully handsome and softspoken, and he thrills her with his talk of being free, free, a law unto himself. He manages this by piracy, robbing the rich and giving generously to the poor. Stimulated by this philosophic man of action, Lady St. Columb begins to act like a heifer with a burr under her tail. At last she sails off with him for a quick dabble in piracy and gentler pastimes.

The affair is terminated by the sudden arrival of her husband and Lord Rocking ham (who gets his just reward) and, more crucially, by Dona’s reawakened sense of duty toward her children. The Lady and the Pirate agree that whereas “women will play at adventure … for a day and a night . . .” sooner or later “they will make their nest.” In a line which appeased the Hays Office and should interest the Legion of Decency, the skipper assures his sweetheart that if she returns to domesticity, “nothing has happened which will make your life a pretense.”

Miss Fontaine, more animated than ever before in a glorious scarlet wig, stirs into her own mannerisms discreet doses of Greer Garson, Irene Dunne and Jean Arthur. If Señor de Cordova is not, as Executive Producer Buddy de Sylva insists, “the hottest discovery since Valentino,” he seems a comely and pleasant young man, a trifle embarrassed by his surroundings, as well he might be. The supporting cast, notably Basil Rathbone, Cecil Kellaway and Ralph Forbes, are beautifully competent in the amusingly spurious manner required of them. The costumes and the colors, the gurgle and glollop of red and gold wines, the ravenously fragrant exhibitions of rare beef and seafood, are enough to draw and quarter four of the five senses.