Motion Picture Herald (May-Jun 1946)

SHOWMEN'S REVIEWS ADVANCE SYNOPSES COMPANY CHART THE RELEASE CHART This department deals with new product from the point of view of the exhibitor who is to purvey it to his own public. Two Smart People MGM — Love Among Thieves John Hodiak, who makes a nice living stealing Government bonds, and Lucille Ball, who does all right selling fake oil paintings, are the principal characters in this over-long story of what happens when a couple of thieves trying to outwit each other are both outwitted by Cupid. The humor of this situation would be much more pointed if the story took less time in the telling. Hodiak, in addition to being a slick man at thieving, is also something of a gourmet and very possibly would like to spend the $500,000 he's stolen for strawberries and cream. But there are a couple of barriers, the major one being a detective, in the person of Lloyd Nolan, who wants to arrest him. The other is Miss Ball, who wants the bonds herself. Hodiak submits to the arrest with the provision that Nolan accompany him on a five-day tour of the Mardi Gras, where they both can eat themselves silly. They start and Miss Ball follows. Now following her is Elisha Cook, Jr., who approaches thieving on a lower level than the two principals. He eventually gets so nasty that he has to be killed. The murder-and-chase scene is done with the principals in clown and pirate costume and against a colorful Mardi Gras background which provides the highlight of the picture. About this time the two leads discover they are in love with one another and would like to forget all about bonds and paintings. Prison terms for both help them forget. Produced by Ralph Wheelwright, it was directed by Jules Dassin from the screenplay by Ethel Hill and Leslie Charteries. Seen at the home office. Reviewer's Rating : Average. — Ray Lanning. Release date, not set. Running time, 93 min. PCA No. 11329. General audience classification. Ricki Woodner Lucille Ball Ace Connors John HodiaJc Bob Simms Lloyd Nolan Hugo Haas, Lenore Ulric, Elisha Cook, Jr., Lloyd Corrigan, Wladimir Sokoloff, David Cota, Clarence Muse. Anno and the King of Siam 20th Century-Fox— D\fferen\ness Does It DifTerentness may turn out to be worth its weight in box office gold when this excellently prodiiced but totally unprecedented biography gets into distribution and becomes known about through customer conversation, for you've got to go back to the late George Arliss' "The Green Goddess" to find a subject to compare it with, and even that comparison requires stretching. Perhaps the expedient and effective thing for showmen playing the picture to do is to shout the praises of Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison in their performances of the title roles and stress the dinerentness of the picture, a subject easier to discuss in generalities than in detail. The biography is that of an English school teacher who goes to Siam in 1863 to teach the king's family the English language and winds up teaching the king how to run his country. She is in conflict with Siamese customs in the beginning, and dismayed to learn that the king's thousand wives and 65 children are to be her pupils, but she stands up to the monarch, a man of strong will, capricious by nature but fundamentally well intentioned, and the story consists chiefly of incidents in which she seeks, for the most part successfully, to guide him rightly in matters of household and state. Theirs is a strange and strained but sincere and always honorable relationship, reaching a crisis when she fails to dissuade him from having a runaway wife burned alive, and its climax at his deathbed, where he expresses his gratitude and his confidence that she will carry on her service. On paper, as in the book by Margaret Landon from which Talbot Jennings and Sally Benson took their screenplay, the account is unimpressive. As produced by Louis D. Lighton, who declined to rely upon spectacle and kept his emphasis upon the key characters, and as directed by John Cromwell, who rejected obvious temptations to inject humor, it is a distinguished production. Craftsmanship is not a thing a showman can shout about on his marquee, but it's the thing that makes this picture an item of consequence in a 1946 world. It should be noted that the matter of the king's possession of a thousand wives, inclusive of designated and successive favorites, and of 65 children, is not one of the Siamese customs to which the English teacher directs her corrective or critical attention, professionally or personally, and that incidents and dialogue related to this matter are dealt with in the unemotional manner of the historian. By and large, the attraction stacks up as professionally excellent, hard to sell in advance, but likely to build strongly as it plays. Inspected at the studio. Revieiver's Rating : Good. — William R. Weaver. Release date, August, 1946. Running time, 128 min. PCA No. 11569. General audience classification. Anna Irene Dunne The King Rex Harrison Linda Darnell, Lee J. Cobb, Gale Sondergaard, Mikhail Rasumny, Dennis Hoey, Tito Renaldo, Richard Lyon, William Edmunds, John Abbott, Leonard Strong, Mickey Roth, Connie Leon. • Janie Gets Married Warners — For "Janie" Fans Tailored directly to the likings of the customers who liked "Janie," and bringing back to them most of the players seen in that film, this production by Alex Gottlieb, directed by Vincent Sherman, deals with the homecoming of the boys who were going off to war in the first picture. The period appears to be that interval between V E-Day and V J-Day, or thereabouts, and the wedding of Janie (played this time by Joan Leslie) to Dick (played by Robert Hutton) gives rise to the mostly amusing and always headlong incidents in the lives of the newlyweds and their in-laws. Time in its flight has not whetted the cutting edge of comedies backgrounded by the uniforming of young Ameri cans, but the picture got quite a collection of laughs at its Hollywood preview nevertheless, a majority of them accruing from the expert performance of the late Robert Benchley. As in the previous picture, Jane is kept constantly in the center of complications, this time of a slightly more mature variety. She marries Dick, to whom her father has given a job on his newspaper, and they get along all right until a WAC he met overseas arrives and pre-empts his time under circumstances which prompt her to feign interest in her old boy friend, Scoopar, who returns home at a psychological moment. The motives of these four, as of the several others who figure in the oJntinuous complications which develop, are tho, best, but it's quite a while before matters get straightened out so that life can run smoothly again for the young couple. Agnes Christine Johnston wrote the original screenplay, based on the characters created by the writers of the Brock Pemberton stage play from which "Janie" was derived. Previewed at Warners' Beverly theatre, Beverly Hills, where it played satisfactorily. Reviewer's Rating : Average. — W. R. W. Release date, June 22, 1946. Running time, 91 min. PCA No. 10968. General audience classification. Joan Leslie 'Rdbcn Button h.dward Arnold, Ann Harding, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Malone, Hattie McDaniel, Dick Erdman, Clare Foley, Donald Meek, Barbara Brown, Margaret Hamilton, Anne Gillis, Ruth Tobey, William Prambes. A Girl in a Million Sydney Box ■ British Lion— Box Does It Again This is an urbane comedy, designed primarily, It may be surmised, by the prolific Mr. Sydney Box for British consumption; although that's not to say it won't be quite successful in certain American theatres. There's nothing flashy about its incidents. It tells a well-mannered, well-ordered tale of a young research scientist plagued with a termagant wife. Her unvaried nagging drives him to divorce and to a vow to eschew all women. In fulfillment thereof he takes a job in a lonely hush-hush research station whence women are barred and where his sole companions are excessively laconic fellow-scientists. Moliere told the tale once before of the would-be misogynist. A somewhat similar fate to that of the Moliere character befalls the present specimen. The research station is invaded by a homeless but dumb, nevertheless extremely pretty young person from America ; the young lady being dumb in the literal sense and not without female guile. She and the scientist fall in love, and he at the subsequent nuptials congratulates himself that he has obtained a wife who simply can't hurl shrewish abuse at him. But presently he sighs for the sound of her voice, which dispensation is vouchsafed him in consequence of the noisy seaside explosion of a drifting mine. There follows an hilarious, if somewhat tangled, finale. The ultra-discerning may feel that Box and MOTION PICTURE HERALD. JUNE 8, 1946 3029