Hear! Hear!

Hear! Hear!

Moviegoers knew it. Hollywood knew it. Louis B. Mayer finally said it. Warning his moviemakers to find fresh replacements for the male actors who are fast being taken by the Army & Navy. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's head man admitted: "Audiences are tired of some of our old faces. They've been looking at them too long. . . ."

The New Pictures

The Gay Sisters (Warner) are a very unhappy trio of prospective million-heiresses: Barbara Stanwyck, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Nancy Coleman. Their mother went down with the Lusitania. Their father died on a World War I battlefield. They have passed the best part of 23 years in court trying to get a clear title to the half-billion dollars fate and father left them. The Gay Sisters chronicles this courtroom crisis straight through to the final gavel.

It is hard to say who is making it tougher for the girls, Warner Bros, or stubborn George Brent. Brent, a rich construction engineer, is the fly in the probate. He could settle everything, but won't because Sister Stanwyck, spokesman of the trio, won't sell him the family Fifth Avenue mansion which is blocking a kind of Rockefeller Center he's building. Stubborn Sister Stanwyck won't sell because her father told her not to. Besides, she was once secretly married to Brent--just long enough to collect a badly needed inheritance from her Aunt Sophronia and to bear Brent a child. Says Sister Fitzgerald when this truth comes out: "Oh, my darling spinster, how you've been had!"

Novelist Stephen Longstreet has a grudge against lawyers and wrote The Gay Sisters to say so. In his novel the lawyers made off with most of the sisters' estate. Warner Bros., with no grudge at all against lawyers, are constrained to angle the picture's villainies some other way. They do it by suggesting that there is something vaguely unholy about owning real estate. The result is a picture whose ponderous pointlessness may well have been foreseen by prescient Miss Stanwyck on the first day's shooting. Said she to Cinemactor Brent, as the cameras prepared to roll: "Well, here we go again."

United We Stand (20th Century-Fox) huffs & puffs at the jumbo job of stuffing 23 fat years (1919-42) of world history into seven lean reels of film. The purpose of this sausagery is to make clear to Americans how the 28 United Nations got together to fight the Axis. It is more likely to make them scratch their heads.

To provide the shots for United's 70-minute running time, a million feet of newsreel film was culled. Result is a hodgepodge of personalities and panjandrumry, from Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles Conference to Franklin Roosevelt and the U.S. declaration of war against the Axis. The film pulls out all the stops (Hitler, Germany's secret rearmament, Daladier, Chamberlain, Munich, the awesome wreckage of Pearl Harbor, etc.), without quite achieving a tune you can whistle.

It does inadvertently achieve a curious cumulative impression of famous and infamous faces under the wear & tear of time. Hitler ages visibly from the bedraggled but hard-driving Chancellor (1933) to the double-chinned, snappish war lord (1941). Bombast and ostentatious health fade from Mussolini's naked dome after the debacle in Greece. From the present's point of view, Laval looks untrustworthy from the start. Irony stalks beside Winston Churchill and Admiral Darlan as they review French sailors together. The tread of marching armies forecasts the kind of fight they will make later on--the Germans, thudding, dour, professional; the Russians, massive, resolute, rough; the Italians, light, out-of-step, a little too gay, a little silly.

These sidelights are the best of United We Stand. The narration (Lowell Thomas) is patronizing, the script (Prosper Buranelli) undistinguished. Commentary, photography and score get in each other's way. Net result is a warning to future producers that it takes more to make historical documentaries than an animated file of old rotogravure sections.

Are Husbands Necessary? (Paramount) may serve to record on celluloid a pattern of U.S. social behavior once considered cute: the late, unlamented antics of the country-club set. But as an attempt at scatterbrained domestic frivolity, it falls flat on its farce.

The picture struggles with the old plot about the slightly whacky, well-meaning little wife (Betty Field) who thinks she can manage her husband's (Ray Milland) career while ignoring the family budget. On his salary as a small-town bank vice president the pair live in a manner to which only Hollywood is accustomed. He cuts up at fancy-dress balls. She has a genius for speaking out of turn. The story strives so hard to be funny that the actors rarely have a chance to be.

The picture was originally called Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, after Isabel Scott Rorick's book, which has sold 25,000 copies. Audiences at sneak previews showed that the title meant nothing to them; many asked: "Where's Xavier?"

The person they referred to was hawk-nosed Bandleader Xavier Cugat, who claims that he is the only Mr. Cugat in the U.S., and sued the publishers, Houghton Mifflin, for using his name. The publishers were sufficiently impressed with his claim to settle his suit out of court. Paramount, too, paid up promptly, then changed the picture's title.

CURRENT & CHOICE

The Magnificent Ambersons (Anne Baxter, Agnes Moorehead, Joseph Gotten, Dolores Costello, Tim Holt; TIME, July 20).

Mrs. Miniver (Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright, Richard Ney; TIME, June 29).

Yankee Doodle Dandy (James Cagney, Walter Huston, Irene Manning, Joan Leslie; TIME, June 22).

Food--Weapon of Conquest (Canadian documentary about food's role in World War II; TIME, June 15).

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