Little Friend

Nova Pilbeam gives a fine first screen performance in Berthold Viertel's movie. She is the witness to the breakup of her parents, Matheson Lang and and Lydia Sherwood. Lang is a loving father, distracted by business, and Miss Sherwood has been engaging in an affair with actor Arthur Margetson. Everyone tries to pretend that nothing is happening, but children are always attentive to what people around them do. Unable to cope, she turns peculiar.

the script by Christopher Isherwood -- it's his first screenplay -- treads a careful path between the reality of the situation and what the censors would permit. Certainly, it is more honest than anything Hollywood might have tried to produce under the newly enforced Production Code, If, in the face of more open and honest films like KRAMER VS. KRAMER, it comes off as coy and with a mildly disturbing ending, well, a lot changed in terms of what was acceptable in movies in the forty-five years that separate the two films. For 1934, it is a fine film, even if its luster has dimmed.

Stark and wonderful film about the effects of a divorcing couple on their young teenage child (Nova Pilbeam).

The film starts with a surreal dream as the child struggles in bed to the sounds of her parents' violent argument in the next room. On the surface everything seems normal but the mother (Lydia Sherwood) is more and more absent from the house, and the father (Matheson Lang) has moved out. She spends most of her time with her governess (Jean Cadell).

The girl starts to catch on that things are not right when she catches the mother in a series of lies. She's having an affair with a ham actor (Arthur Margetson), who in an attempt to befriend the girl (he calls her his "little friend"), says she may visit him whenever she likes and they'll talk.

After catching the mother in another lie, the girl races away on her scooter and heads into the main street where sh crashes into a delivery boy (Jimmy Hanley) who becomes her closest friend.

After a series in incidents, the girl finally runs off to the actor's house where she discovers her mother in his bedroom. After a botched suicide attempt, the girl ends up in court, trying to lie to save her mother's reputation.

Pilbeam, in her first film, is around 15 (and playing younger) and she's just terrific as the betrayed child. Sherwood and Lang are good at playing the unsympathetic parents. Cadell and Margetson are solid. Jimmy Hanley almost steals the film as the cheerful delivery boy.

Co-stars include Cecil Parker, Finlay Currie, Clare Greet, and Fritz Kortner as a menacing giant in a grim children's play.

Pilbeam would of course have her biggest film successes in Hitchcock's YOUNG AND INNOCENT and THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. She remains an intriguing talent of the 30s and 40s, an exceptional young actress who should have been a bigger star.

The themes and images of nightmare, horror, danger, menace, betrayal, and sorrow are beautifully handled in this very un-Hollywood-like film.

In his memoir CHRISTOPHER AND HIS KIND, Christopher Isherwood devotes an entire chapter to working with Viertel. Novelist Margaret Kennedy wrote an earlier screenplay, but Viertel didn't like it, or her, calling her 'a crocodile who wept once in her life a real tear.' Isherwood, who never saw the Kennedy script, though they are co-credited as writers, was suggested as a collaborator by Jean Ross, the real-life "Sally Bowles" of his Berlin stories (She demanded half his first week's salary in return.) Viertel wanted someone who spoke German, and was new to movies; "He needed an amateur, an innocent, a disciple, a victim," writes Isherwood. A professional would have made Viertel embarrassed at working on this piece of trivia, but he told Isherwood, 'I feel absolutely no shame before you; we are like two married men who meet in a whorehouse.' During production, Viertel used the fact that both could speak German to impress the crew, taking Isherwood into the corner and discussing finer points of the film in that language while the technicians looked on in awe. For all Viertel's contempt for LITTLE FRIEND, it was successful both financially and critically,described by the NEW YORK TIMES as "very close to being a masterpiece of its kind."