Photoplay (Jan-Jun 1948)

I? <•' Guaranteed by ^ Good Housekeeping 40VIBTISID How Arthur Murray girls keep instructresses rely °n Famous ms deodorant! this “safe-and-sure Arthur Murray instruc* .DUTIFUL, TM-tNUD^ 5OC«l po.se Vtiauet works so efecttueiy A ded upon to ouXy e/feW job-* ac,ive exercise. S&^Sffi==» sSS=f»S.«a dainlTS”;,b You-Ufoti * at all cosmetic com.US“6 m&I, 39* and 59* — Etkraet The safe-and-sure deodorant ( Continued jrom page 12) misses by a gasp or two. Maybe it’s because Montgomery really seems too harmless a chap to be mixed up in it. Your Reviewer Says: Not up to standard. ^The Guilt of Janet Ames (Columbia) THERE’S a lot of mist in this with Rosalind Russell as a neurotic war widow walking right through it. As you can imagine, this is quite a trick, accomplished here by several dream-like sequences. Melvyn Douglas is a newspaper man who tries to get Rosalind to forget her personal grief by introducing her into the lives of the other veterans her husband’s death saved. This is the type film that is hard to make and, unless done perfectly, is also hard to take. It represents a fairly good try at portraying mental images, but it never quite takes the audience along with Russell in her visionary moments. Since the handling of all the sequences is the same — Douglas literally talking Rosalind into a dream-like state in which she “sees” the veterans against a painfully artificial background — the film begins to drag. It is saved momentarily by Sid Caesar who, as one of the veterans, does a sparked-up take-off on all “psychological” films in general and even has Janet Ames laughing at itself. Russell and Douglas both try hard with material that’s difficult to get a grip on. It’s an experimental type picture, and you may enjoy watching it more than you would a routine mediocre film. Your Reviewer Says: Maybe. Song of Scheherazade ( Universal-International ) DREAMED up from the music of RimskyKorsakoff, this is exactly like a dream —one you might have after looking at too many storybooks. It has everything anyone might want; the only trouble is you may not want it all at once. A Russian naval ship is becalmed in a Moroccan port ’way back in 1865 when the Russians were known as gay romancers. The port is just the place for a good plot to develop, centering around Yvonne de Carlo who’s dancing incognito in an Oriental cafe. Young naval cadet Rimsky-Korsakoff — a beaming Jean Pierre Aumont — is busy writing music; he really doesn’t appreciate Yvonne, an omission that is rectified by woman-charmer Philip Reed. Yvonne’s mama (Eve Arden) appreciates both Aumont and Reed — as a matter of fact, she appreciates the whole Russian Navy. After a lot of music, songs by Charles Kullman, a cracking good bull-whip fight, slinky Eastern dances by Yvonne and stern fatherly discipline by Brian Donlevy, everyone is ready to call it quits and go to St. Petersburg to see “Scheherazade” produced in flashy Technicolor. If you don’t take it seriously, you’ll have a fair time. No one in the cast performs in any extraordinary fashion, but they all try to make good Russians— and they do look nice in their white uniforms. Your Reviewer Says: Just for the fun of it. Escape Me Never (Warners) A PICTURE has no right to have such a sudden change of heart. For the first hour, this is an unimportant little operettalike film in which Errol Flynn, Eleanor Parker, Ida ( Continued on page 16) 14