Mothers and He Men

Jack Benny (born Benny Kubelsky) was winding up a smalltime career in vaudeville when bigtime Comedian Eddie Cantor (born Izzy Iskowitz) was taking vaudeville through new Cantortions on the air. This year Jell-O's Jack Benny nosed out Ventriloquist's Dummy Charlie McCarthy as No. 1 man of the air (TIME, Feb. 12). Cantor was not in radio at all, had had no air sponsor since last June.

But he had made a new picture--Forty Little Mothers (M.G.M.). So had Comedian Benny--Buck Benny Rides Again (Paramount). This coincidence was the more curious because both comedians' last pictures were no great shakes. Cantor's Ali Baba Goes to Town left 20th Century-Fox like a visit of the forty thieves. Benny's Man About Town suggested that some Benny fans would rather listen free to than pay to look at their hero.

Buck Benny Rides Again hides Comedian Benny under a ten-gallon hat, takes him west to prove himself a he-man to attractive Ellen Drew. Otherwise it is just a Jack Benny radio program minus Mary Livingstone (Mrs. Jack Benny), and Benny addicts should find it just as entertaining. It has Rochester (Eddie Ander son), Benny's gravel-voiced, colored stooge; Carmichael (the polar bear); the disembodied voice of Fred Allen (whose mock feud with Benny weekly wows their camp followers); tunes, dances, a lot of fancy showmanship, girls and gags. People with a taste for deeper humor are cautioned that unlike the radio, the picture cannot be tuned off at will.

Forty Little Mothers, the Cantor offering, was once Le Mioche (The Kid), a charming French film comedy, though the producers of Le Mioche might not recognize their baby. For once Comedian Cantor is unusually restrained. As a worried bachelor professor who furtively fathers an abandoned boy baby in a girls' seminary, Cantor limits his histrionics to planting wet smacks on the patient infant, singing one lachrymose ditty, Little Curly Hair. Once tears trickle down his nose. But smart Showman Cantor lets cute Baby Quintanilla, and scads of leggy little schoolgirls, among whom are Bonita Granville and Diane Lewis (Mrs. William Powell; TIME, Jan. 15), carry the picture.

Unpleasant surprise: majestic Judith Anderson (the weird housekeeper of Rebecca) cast by one of Hollywood's amazing artistic lapses as a Cantor stooge.

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