The New Pictures

Christmas in July (Paramount), previously titled Cup of Coffee and Ants in Their Pants, is the cinema success about poor people in Manhattan which, after so many recent tries, the law of averages made inevitable. Written and directed by Hollywood's latest Fair-Haired Boy--kinetic Preston Sturges (The Great McGinty)--produced for a paltry $325,000, it once again gives the lie to the arbitrary Hollywood assumption that a film's quality is in direct proportion to its cost.

As scenarist, Sturges wrote a tender little tale about 24 hours in the life of Jimmy MacDonald (Dick Powell), a perennial slogan contestant who is out for Maxford House Coffee Co.'s $25,000 prize. Powell is a $22-a-week comptometer clerk with three practical-joking friends who paste together a bogus telegram notifying him he has won the contest. By dint of some improbable inefficiency in the Maxford House organization, he collects the check, spends a sizable slice of it before the hoax is bared.

As director, Sturges converted this unpretentious plot into a happy, slightly noisy comedy with a Chaplinesque background of pathos. He ably remodeled Powell from the vacuous crooner of Warner Brothers musicals into a convincing prototype of a drudge with a dream of sudden wealth with which he can buy his mother a convertible settee and his girl a fancy wedding. Pale-faced, canyon-mouthed Ellen Drew, a onetime Hollywood soda clerk, was coached into a realistic likeness of a sugary, $18-a-week stenographer. A good dramatist, Sturges kept his characters credible by the simple but neglected technique of letting them act like people. For instance, when the Maxford House president is writing out Powell's contest check, he pauses to ask: "Do you spell your name Me or Mac?"

After eight years in Hollywood, Preston Sturges readily qualifies as one of the busiest bees in that lethargic hive. First he has his Paramount writing and directing duties which bring in $2,750 weekly. Then he has his restaurant, The Players, which he visits every day for an administrative glance. Once a week he drives 20 miles to Wilmington to look over the Sturges Engineering Co., which manufactures a vibrationless Diesel engine and an exercise machine devised by Sturges. At his newly acquired house, which was just rebuilt under his personal supervision, he finds time to play billiards, badminton, a grand piano; to swim and give small dinner parties specializing in rich European dishes; to arrange and admire a vast collection of ship's models; to sleep. Two or three times a month he takes a day's cruise in his yacht or a whirl in his power launch, both harbored at San Pedro. One night a week he bowls with Paramount pals. He is preparing a play for Broadway's current season, a book of short stories. Daily he records his activities in a diary. Between conferences on his coming film, The Lady Eve, which he has finished writing and will soon direct, he visits the dentist to have some teeth pulled, because "it will give me more energy." Tall, tousle-haired, but a natty dresser, Sturges has spent a good part of his 42 years in Europe. In the U. S. during the '20s, he turned to playwrighting. After one failure he showed up with Strictly Dishonorable, written in six successive days. It ran two years. He was unable to repeat, eventually went to Hollywood. Sturges constantly pestered producers to let him direct what he wrote. Says Sturges: "When a picture gets good notices, everyone but the writer is the prince. So I decided, by God, I was going to be one of the princes." When Paramount Producer William Le Baron finally appeased him with the director's assignment on The Great McGinty, he proved his point.

Knute Rockne--All American (Warner). When George Gipp (Ronald Reagan), famed Rockne pupil, says of his coach: "He's given us something they don't teach you in schools, something clean and strong inside," he summarized the feelings of every character whom Warner Brothers have inserted in the cinema's most ambitious football film. From the time Knute Rockne is a child of three in Norway until he sails west on a doomed airliner in the spring of 1931, he is a bulwark of stoicism, inner goodness, charm, sincerity, friendship. Through all his ordeals--a knockout in a sandlot game when he is only seven, the decision whether to be a coach or chemist at Notre Dame, his proposal to Bonnie Skiles (Gale Page), the death of Gipp, the time his boys drop a decision to the Army, the investigation of proselyting among college athletes--"Rock" maintains an impervious goodness.

After the usual number of confirmations and denials, Warners chose poker-faced Pat O'Brien to play Rockne. The selection was like a distinguished service cross to O'Brien, who, like most Irish-American males, is a violent Notre Dame fan in spite of the fact he teased their marching song at parties with a parody beginning: "Shame, shame on old Notre Dame. The Jews and the Polaks have stolen your game." Some plastic work to spread his nose and blondined hair and eyebrows change the O'Brien face into a reasonable facsimile of Norse Knute Rockne. When Bonnie Skiles Rockne, who was brought to Hollywood for technical advice, had her first look at O'Brien's makeup, she pleased the publicity department by admitting: "I expected him to come up and make love to me." Such authenticity is not the hallmark of Knute Rockne--All American. Faithful and respectful as it may be to the Rockne biography, its frequent newsreel shots of Notre Dame at football are filled with chronological inaccuracies such as showing the lateral pass as a potent Army offensive weapon in 1925, goalposts in the end zones in a game supposed to have taken place in 1913. In 1940 spectators with weightier matters on their minds may have a hard time taking seriously for an hour and thirty-eight minutes the Warners' solemn anxieties about the South Bend ball club.

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