Review of Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

One summer night in 1956 it was a straight choice between this and "The Man With The Golden Arm".Frank Sinatra in a controversial junkie movie with a cool Elmer Bernstein score and Shorty Rogers as a band - leader. Did I want to see William Holden and Jennifer Jones in a schmaltzy love story with a soppy theme song that was all over the radio?You couldn't escape from it.All the record shops in Brighton were playing it,even Woolworth's own label,"Embassy",were selling out of copies.My girl - friend thought Sinatra was "square" and "Shorty who?" was her only comment when I mentioned the music,so "Love is a many splendurd thing" it was then. She sobbed throughout and clung onto my hand - which was a plus.I smoked my "Olivier"(nothing pretentious then!) right up to the corked tip before tucking into the recently off- ration Cadbury's bar until I felt slightly nauseous. Up on the screen Jennifer Jones was totally unconvincing as a Eurasian doctor in love with gruff,cynical William Holden,American Newshound. The more Miss Jones mentioned the fact that she was Eurasian the less I believed her - for a start her eyes seemed to have changed shape from time to time and she seemed to have trouble talking in Chinese on the few occasions she attempted to do so.She was too matronly to be sexy,too girlish to be a doctor.This was not helped by the fact that the Chinese actor who played her colleague read his lines as if they were the instructions for a particularly complicated item of electronic equipment. Whenever Mr Holden was supposed to be happy and gay(Ah,those were the days when a chap could be gay without looking over his shoulder)he merely succeeded in looking marginally less grumpy than usual. And the bit on the high and windy hill?Well,my girlfriend was almost beyond comfort by then,the heavenly choir soaring into space on the back of that all - too - familiar tune.I found an old handkerchief wrapped round a half - empty packet of "Spangles" in my pocket and handed it to her in a gesture she mistook for being one of eternal devotion when all I wanted to do was get her cleaned up for the walk to the bus station. As we walked hand in hand down a West Street blisfully free of drunks,dopers,cardboard city dwellers and "Big Issue" salespeople she began to sing "Love is a many splendoured thing" in a soft,sweet voice and I realised,perhaps rather belatedly,that we were not ideally suited.