STAGE AND SCREEN
THE CINEMA
A Date With Destiny." At the Plaza.
PSYCHIATRISTS and psycho-analysts will hardly enjoy this film, which presents a villain whose talents in the realm of the psyche are used for a succession of ingenious wife-murders, and who, in the end, fails dismally to carry out the precept, " Physician, heal thyself." A Date With Destiny is indeed merely a thriller with a difference, the difference being that, instead of the evils of gangsterdom or the bully and brawn of cattle-rustling, we are presented with a tangled skein pulled from the wool-basket of pseudo-Freudian case-books.
Dr. George Sebastian, when we first meet him, has just finished off his second wife (though not without raising vague suspicions in the mind of the old village doctor), and is off to New York with his villainous assistant, there to set up a chromium salon for the psyches of millionaires' wives. Soon he finds an heiress with a complex almost as murky as that of Judith in Cold Comfort Farm, and sets himself to the task of curing her (by a mixture of hypnotism and piano-playing) and then of winning her hand in marriage. At this point it is revealed to us that he has earlier escaped from the condemned cell in Vienna for the murder of an even earlier wife and her lover, that his mind has been permanently warped by this event (pre- sumably he did not trust either the secrecy or the capabilities of professional colleagues). He marries the heiress, and incon- veniently finds himself En love with her. This cures his complex and he prepares to leave his evil ways. But alas! the flock of earlier murders now come home to roost, driven by the young reporter (John Howard) from whom he has stolen the girl. He is forced to indulge in further assassinations ; but it is too late, and he leaps gracefully from the roof of a skyscraper, but not before the girl has learnt all, and as a result is presumably in a welter of far more complex complexes than ever before.
Basil Rathbone, as polished as usual, plays the doctor, and his acting does much to make the ridiculous story convincing. The film is also very well directed, by Tim Whelan ; the settings are authentic in character and include that rara avis of Hollywood films, a sequence on the New York subway. Ellen Drew, as the unfortunate heroine, hovers uneasily between the fey and the fantastic, and wears the most ravishing costumes. And finally the film gives a good tourist boost to the Republic of Ecuador, which is constantly referred to—no doubt with great accuracy— as " A paradise on earth under a parasol of stars." Analyse that
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