The New Pictures

A Guy, a Girl and a Gob (RKO Radio). Coffee Cup (George Murphy) is a whacky extrovert of the Step-Right-Up-and-Call-Me-Speedy school with a TNT punch, an irrepressible line of chatter, a knack-for betting on the wrong side, an unfailingly empty purse. Dot Duncan (Lucille Ball) is the girl. Belabored by a shiftless family of zanies and a vague inclination towards matrimony, she seems completely satisfied just tagging along with Coffee Cup as he churns up street brawls, whirls around the dance halls or lounges in a hamburger joint with his sailor pals. Dot's boss is the guy. Played by newcomer Edmond O'Brien, the boss looks very depressed as he sprawls behind his big desk, but when he joins the capers of Coffee Cup and Dot, he perks up like a puppy. All in all, it adds up to old-fashioned slap-happy fun.

Nice Girl? (Universal) abruptly halts the string of eight pleasant, sprightly tuneful Deanna Durbin films which have been the financial anchor of Universal Pictures Co. for the last four years. In it, grinning little Producer Joe Pasternak, who has nurtured Deanna like a prize petunia, has gone wildly askew with a somnolent essay on bourgeois life in a small New England town.

Nice Girl? resembles a shiny Rolls-Royce that won't run. Carried in its cast is a selection of Hollywood's most polished performers--'Robert Benchley, Walter Brennan, Helen Broderick, Franchot Tone. But their efforts to keep the aimless, insipid Richard Connell-Gladys Lehman screen play afloat are like the haphazard courage of doomed men. Benchley as a widower highschool principal with three lightheaded daughters (Deanna, Anne Gwynne, Ann Gillis) looks as if he were trying to get by unrecognized. Since there is no observable plot, the rest of the characters just meander around the Benchley household, where Brennan, the village postman, is required to make middle-aged puppy love to Miss Broderick, Benchley's housekeeper. Deanna, a little more mature, a little more cosmeticized with a brand-new pair of arched eyebrows, is mainly occupied with trying to catch the eye of her next-door neighbor (toothy Robert Stack), who seems more interested in his automobile.

Adam Had Four Sons (Columbia). As the stock market is crashing during the 1907 panic, Broker Adam Stoddard (Warner Baxter) casually tells his secretary: "There's nothing wrong with me that my family won't cure." Forthwith he bustles off to his wife (Fay Wray) and four sons, comfortably settled in an ample Connecticut establishment enlivened by an attractive young governess (Ingrid Bergman). As the Stoddard family bounces along in their touring car or gobbles a big Thanksgiving dinner, they give a pretty picture of opulent early 20th-century existence.

But Adam Had Four Sons is not satisfied with this homey tranquillity. Soon Mrs. Stoddard dies, the fortune is wiped out, the governess shipped back home.

When the World War I boom refills Adam's purse, back comes the governess and everything begins to look like old times even though the cast has aged. But the war catches some of them, produces a troublesome little wife (Susan Hayward) for son David (Johnny Downs), who goes abroad with the Canadian Air Force.

The transition to tragedy and parlor problems burdens the film with more labored histrionics than an oldtime melodrama. As the second U. S. screen appearance of Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman (Intermezzo) and the first for Warner Baxter in more than a year, it gives neither a chance to show more than their frowns.

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