New Picture

Sun Valley Serenade (20th Century-Fox) is pleasantly put together around the reasonable assumption that Sonja Henie fans have tired of seeing Henie skate. Instead, Sonja plays a Norwegian refugee who skis.

Henie with the ice-brown eyes, still Nordic as an Axel Paulsen, whooshes through her dramadventure with commendable vigor and a fetching show of talent, and she has the advantage of having dieted away considerable poundage for this new appearance. As an able-bodied refugee, she becomes the embarrassing charge of a jive pianist .(Jonn Payne), who thought he was adopting an infant war orphan. But when he discovers she can ski, he gladly chucks his indoors blues singer (Lynn Bari) for his Nasturtium of the North.

To please all hands, and to graft Serenade tight to the U.S. box office, 20th Century has made it a ski-musical. For those who suffer from the brassy effects of Glenn Miller's hot and cold treatment of fair-to-middling new tunes (best: Chattanooga Choo Choo), there is plenty of slaloming at Idaho's Sun Valley. Performed by experts (and happily lampooned by liver-lipped Comic Milton Berle), the skiing sequences are a spectacular job of chiaroscuro photography.

Although Sonja Henie and her ballet give only one performance on skates, it is stylishly performed in pure white costumes on a sheet of coal-black ice (part water, part India ink). To prevent the skate marks from showing up white it was necessary to keep a film of unfrozen water over the black ice.

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