The New Pictures

Father Takes a Wife (RKO Radio) is tailored to measure for almond-eyed Gloria Swanson, making her reappearance on the screen after seven years. A sophisticated comedy with enough snap in its dialogue and situations to earn a passing grade, it demands only a minimum performance from the hard-eyed, prognathous beauty who was once queen of the silent movies.

There is nothing wrong with his age, says Father (Adolphe Menjou), that Leslie Collier (Miss Swanson) can't cure; so de la Falaise, Marquis de la Coudraye, in 1925, she became the first Hollywood actress to enter London and Paris society, which found her "less like an actress and more like a lady than you could imagine." Legend has it that Miss Swanson prefaced her triumphal return to Hollywood with the Marquis by telegraphing Paramount: "Am arriving with the Marquis tomorrow. Please arrange ovation." Gloria Swanson, single once again after her four marriages, has a busy and original mind, a reserved and dignified manner, and a vast store of kinetic energy. She has one eye on the potentialities of her younger daughter, Michelle-Bridgit, 9. Of her Gloria Swanson has said: "She'll be an actress, I know. Emotional and moody. She lies and steals and her mind works like an eel."

Hold Back the Dawn (Paramount) triumphantly wrestles with a U.S. immigration problem: how to keep unscrupulous foreigners from marrying their way into the U.S. Dawn's solution is the regular box-office answer to an almost rhetorical question: "Is it love, or is it immigration?"

In the case of balding, banjo-eyed Charles Boyer, the answer is love. Love laughs at locked frontiers, drops M. Boyer, 42, into the U.S. melting pot. As Georges Iscovescu, renowned European gigolo and dancer, he is one of a hotelful of emigres impatiently waiting to cross into the U.S. from a little Mexican border town. Impatient at the slow arrival of his quota number, he takes a tip from a former dancing partner (Paulette Goddard) who has married her way across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Emigre Boyer's victim is Schoolmarm Olivia de Havilland of Azusa* ("everything from A to Z in the U.S.A."). Against Boyer's liquid-eyed, strong-charm methods she never has a chance: they are married in a jiffy. Wised up by Dancer Goddard, Olivia holds her pretty head so high that her husband realizes he is in love with her. That's all the immigration authorities wanted to know. He gets in.

Dawn's three principals are so perfectly cast that they seem to have been especially equipped to play their roles. Miss de Havilland's performance and some of the film's minor business are artfully done. If Director Mitchell Leisen and Producer Arthur Hornblow Jr. had been content to strip the picture of its elaborate frills (e.g., a prolonged cops-&-robbers chase, a native festival) and tell it simply, it might have been Grade-A.

Lady Be Good (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the name of a U.S. musicomedy which Prime Minister Winston Churchill recalls with considerable pleasure. It is also the title of the hit song of the show--a 1924 Broadway show that had everything: music (some of his best) by George Gershwin; lyrics by his brother Ira; book by Guy Bolton and Fred Thompson; and the dancing Astaires (Fred and Adele).

Of this everything, M.G.M.'s Lady Be Good has salvaged only two of the Gershwin melodies: the title song and Fascinating Rhythm. Around these still glittering butterfly relics three studio scripters (Jack McGowan, Kay Van Riper, John McClain) have spun one of the longest, dullest plots in many a cinema season:

The crack songwriting team (willowy Ann Sothern and stuffy Robert Young) splits up because its male member is too fond of wallowing in high society. They divorce and become separate failures. They remarry and click again. Then, for unco good measure, they very nearly repeat the routine. This folderol consumes no minutes.

Despite the tedious script (which fails to provide Comic Red Skelton with any comedy at all) and a pox of poor direction (e.g., composing a hit tune in about two minutes flat), the picture has some lively moments: the dead-pan vocalizing of frightened Virginia O'Brien, the up-from-the-jungle hoofing of the Berry Brothers, and the nostalgia of the old sweet Gershwin songs.

Ann Sothern turns in a heroic performance. Separated from her accustomed role as heroine of M.G.M.'s Maisie series (TIME, Aug. 18), blonde, shapely Trouper Sothern almost saves the show. Her singing of The Last Time I Saw Paris is a model of how to put across that over-bleated dirge. And her version of Lady Be Good should please even a Prime Minister.

* There is such a town (pop. 5,209) in California.

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