The New Pictures

Life Begins at 8:30 (20th Century-Fox) combines the talents of one of Hollywood's funniest script writers, Nunnally Johnson, and one of Broadway's funniest actors, Monty Woolley. Unfortunately it also is based on one of last season's dullest Broadway plays, Yesterday's Magic. The result is not worthy of Johnson & Woolley, but they contrive to make the film fairly entertaining.

Monty is an old tosspot actor with a crippled daughter (Ida Lupino) whom he dropped on the floor as an infant and who has been vainly trying to get him sober ever since. Daughter finally accepts a suitor and simultaneously persuades her father to attempt a comeback in King Lear. From there on the plot falls to pieces.

The picture has its Woolley moments, however. One of them comes when Monty, as a department-store Santa Claus, sucks "Alabama fog-cutters" (cocktail of unspecified ingredients) through a tube from a hot-water bottle concealed under his suit, and suddenly roars at all the kiddies and mammas: "How I hate you, one and all!" Another occurs when he stares coldly at an unwelcome female admirer (Sara Allgood) and remarks: "I have no idea what bearing it may have on your plans, but I now propose to remove my trousers."

Who Done It? (Universal) offers Abbott & Costello in a new role as a pair of amateur detectives, but it is still the same picture they have made seven times before under different titles. The formula has been good enough to make them Hollywood's No. 1 box-office attraction. But this time their act seems a little more corny than usual.

The script gets off on the wrong foot by surrounding them with such a loony murder story that their own looniness scarcely registers. But it would not hit very hard, in any event. Eight Abbott & Costello comedies appear to have exhausted the team.

In Who Done It?, beginning as soda jerks ambitious to write radio thrillers and going on to a cops & robbers chase, they regale their fans with such choice double-takes as "Who?" "Watt," "That's what I said." Their freshest gag:

Abbott declares: It must be rigor mortis.

Costello: Is he on this murder case too?

Who Done It? may allow even the most thoroughly mesmerized Abbott & Costello subject to slip from his trance.

Mashenka (Artkino) is a simple, tender Russian tale of a Red Army tank man and a nurse. Its background is the Russo-Finnish War, its showpiece a superb battle scene. The love story has to overcome the handicaps of wooden English subtitles, sluggish direction and drab staging. Says Hero Mikhail Kuznetzov, laying bare his passion to Heroine Valentina Karavayeva: "Mashenka, in our time the fate of the world is being decided, and that fate must be decided by us. We are facing a stern and militant life, and I want to share that life with you."

Despite their turgid libretto, the Soviet pair sometimes make the usual Hollywood boy & girl look puerile.

Street of Chance (Paramount) is a twisted thoroughfare indeed for amnesic Burgess Meredith. Soon after a blow on the head knocks him into realizing that there has been a total blank in his life, a terrifying stranger (Sheldon Leonard) rushes after his taxi, hammers maniacally on the window. A tough blonde (Claire Trevor) has proudly saved the newsclips about the murder Meredith learns he is being hounded for. In a Long Island mansion, with the help of a paralytic old lady (Adeline De Walt Reynolds), he at last gets the heat turned on the real culprit.

It is an uncommonly nice idea for a cinemystery -- since the audience shares Meredith's amnesia, not only people but streets, windows, and noises can be loaded with cryptic threats. If those who made the picture had used these possibilities for all, instead of merely half, their worth, Street of Chance would have equaled Alfred Hitchcock's best scarifying tours-de-force. Street of Chance does not reach that high standard.

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