New Picture

Kiss the Boys Goodbye (Paramount) left Broadway in the form of a satiric comedy devoted to the triumph of an egomaniacal Southern belle over a house-partyful of intellectual Yankee drunkards. It emerges from the Hollywood wringer in the guise of a musicomedy burlesque of professional Southernism.

Cindy Lou Bethany of Authoress Clare Boothe's play was a syrupy Southern blue blood who went to a Connecticut house-party with a Hollywood director to meet a Hollywood producer and salt away the screen role of Velvet O'Toole, the Confederate heroine of the national best-seller Kiss the Boys Goodbye. Paramount's Cindy Lou (Mary Martin) is an out-of-work Broadway chorine who scurries to her ancestral Southern home after learning that a Broadway director (night-blooming Don Ameche) is Dixie-bound to scour the South for a sure-nuf Southern belle to play the lead in a Broadway musicomedy. She gets the job after butting into a swimming pool a rival actress with a very high cruising speed.

These high jinks pan out into an acceptable and amusing musicomedy. Mary Martin polishes off a tuneful score in her best My Heart Belongs to Daddy manner. She also carries the ball around the Hays office right end with a song about how she got her start, which permits her to repeat her strip tease that first lit the domes of Broadway's Bald-Head Row in 1938. Connie Boswell and Rochester (Eddie Anderson, Jack Benny's valet) run first-rate interference for her with a punchy song&-dance number called Sand in My Shoes.

Typical gag from the Harry Tugend-Dwight Taylor script: a songwriter (Oscar Levant) trying to converse with Cindy Lou's fire-eating aunt (Elizabeth Patterson) in the midst of her relics of the Confederacy: "My mother had a lot of General Grant's things in her home." She: "Bottles, I presume!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.