The New Pictures

The Smiling Lieutenant (Paramount) was expensively designed to provide Maurice Chevalier with proper and improper opportunities to display his ingratiating leer, wear a straw hat with dinner clothes, gurgle flip bedchamber music as the accompaniment of an amorous escapade. Ernst Lubitsch, hired to give the proceedings the correct continental air, used sarcastic burlesque to brighten up a plot which no one would need to be told came out of an Austrian novel. He had fairly good material to work with--the story of a young lieutenant who, during a review for visiting royalty, winked at his girl just as the Princess went past. The Princess thought the wink had been meant for her and married the lieutenant who used the royal police force to assist his attentions to his old sweetheart. Finally she (Claudette Colbert) transformed the Princess (Miriam Hopkins) into a satisfactory bride by showing her what kind of clothes to wear. Typical shots: Chevalier embracing Claudette Colbert; Chevalier explaining to Princess Hopkins the significance of winking.

Le Million (Tobis). If any early cinemas are revived in 1960, they are likely to be those primitive comedies whose directors, dazzled by the speed and flexibility of the new medium, made their characters participate in comic pursuits, prolonged and exaggerated through a series of wild mishaps. The cinema has since mastered other and more subtle methods of achieving funny effects and a Hollywood director might have thought twice before resorting to the simple old pursuit device as Director Rene Clair (Sous Les Toits de Paris) does in Le Million. As in comic opera, with swift pictorial action and amusing musical interludes, Le Million depicts its hero's vicissitudes. The hero wins a fortune in a lottery but he has left the lottery ticket in the pocket of an old coat. He has left the coat in his sweetheart's room. She gives it to a thief in a hurry to be disguised. The thief sells it to an opera singer who needs it for a costume. Finally, the hero gets it back.

The difficulties of retrieving the coat are not so ingenuously preposterous as those imagined by originators of the old-time farces. Director Clair, perceiving opportunities for satire, has made the opera singer a stout, pretentious clown, the thief & friends ridiculous prototypes of U. S. gangsters, the hero's creditors a crew of rascally lickspittles. He pokes fun at the opera by showing the property man making a snowstorm out of paper, music lovers applauding before a duet is finished. Francophiles, whose excuses for cheering the French cinema were somewhat limited before Sons Les Toits de Paris, will be pleased to discover that Director Clair has made Le Million easily intelligible to U. S. cinemaddicts--by revealing developments in the coat-chase through the conversation of two sleepy Englishmen who inspect the excitement from the roof of the hero's studio. Notable in a cast of brilliant French character actors is Rene Lefebvre.

Shipmates (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Robert Montgomery made a name for himself in minor-part impersonations of the jeunesse doree. He had an ability possessed by few other young cinemactors to give the impression, without wearing a heavy sweater or a key on his watch-chain, of having gone to college. Nevertheless, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer decided that his first star role should be that of a sailor, apparently an orphan, in an unlikely story which serves no purpose beyond the unnecessary one of advertising the U. S. Navy. In the improbable and not very amusing incidents which lead to Montgomery's union with an admiral's daughter, he is called upon to scrub decks, have both eyes blacked by a bosun's mate, wear a borrowed tailcoat which gets wet. He maintains, in spite of these handicaps, an air of stubborn frivolousness. When his girl refuses to speak to him he makes his disappointment hilarious in one line by saying: "O.K. ... O. K. ... O.K. ... O. K. ... O. K." . . .

Although Shipmates may not enhance his reputation, Robert Montgomery is almost certain to earn more startling remuneration than the $10,000 bonus which he received after playing with Norma Shearer in Strangers May Kiss. His qualifications, personal rather than technical, are partly the result of a respectable upbringing in Beacon, N. Y., partly of a long neck which causes his head to incline in a quizzical fashion. His eyes have the kind of crinkle that shopgirls call "cute." When his father, who was a vice president of New York Rubber Co. died, Robert Montgomery left Pawling School where he had learned to play good golf and tennis, took to driving a fertilizer truck. William Faversham let him play five small parts in The Mask and the Face. He lives in a bungalow called "Chez Montgomery," claims that he has worked every day except eleven in the past two years. He has succumbed to a few typical Hollywood eccentricities, such as ordering a steak for dessert, reading Russian history, wearing a bright yellow polo coat "so people will know I'm an actor."

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