The New Pictures

Thousands Cheer (M.G.M.) is not to be confused with the crisp, memorable As Thousands Cheer which Irving Berlin and Moss Hart brought to Broadway a decade ago. M.G.M. reportedly paid $25,000 for that show and its bull's-eye title back in 1935, but has taken its own aim from there on. The MGMarksmen ring no resounding bell, but they do bag 1) an average musical wartime romance (Private Gene Kelly v. Colonel's-Daughter Kathryn Grayson), 2) a brisk, hefty variety show featuring a clutch of M.G.M. stars and three bands (Kay Kyser, Bob Crosby, Benny Carter), 3) Pianist Jose Iturbi in his screen debut.

The romance is a by-product of the cinemilitary career of talented Gene Kelly, who before the Army gets him is a temperamental trapeze star. Private Kelly's yearning to get back in the air (in a plane) and an approaching court-martial for breach of discipline cause him to toy with Kathryn Grayson's affections in hopes that her father, his Colonel (John Boles), will transfer him to the Air Forces. The Colonel wants a less insubordinate son-in-law. Aware that trapeze work involves a certain amount of disciplined cooperation, he asks the young artist's adoptive family, The Flying Corbinos, to needle the boy during the camp's Victory Show. So they discuss teamwork with Trapezist Kelly while the whole troupe is lunging about between heaven and the hard floor. Mr. Kelly, though profoundly disconcerted, gets the idea, drops nobody, comes out of a two-and-a-half somersault with his lesson learned and Miss Grayson's heart somewhere between her throat and the palm of his hand. He is promptly forgiven by the court-martial and goes off to war, while Songstress Grayson (plus an orchestra and some 390 male choristers) gives tongue to United Nations, by Russian Composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

The show is dished out by Master of Ceremonies Mickey Rooney. Kay Kyser's noisy faculty teaches I Dug a Ditch, assisted by comely Georgia Carroll. Bob Crosby's band backs Baby Basilisk Virginia O'Brien in In a Little Spanish Town. Benny Carter cultivates Honeysuckle Rose for elegant Lena Home. Frank Morgan pretends to be a doctor, gets slap-happy in his examination of Ann Sothern, Lucille Ball and Marsha Hunt, who want to be WAVES. Red Skelton is a soda jerker with an allergy for ice cream. Judy Garland makes scat-singing like "Tchai-tchai-tchaikovsky" bearable in Let There Be Music. Senor Iturbi, forced by the curious exigencies of the screen to prove that he is almost anything else but a ranking pianist, trots out some fair boogie-woogie, takes care to play nothing worth hearing in one of the best recordings a screen piano has ever received.

Sweet Rosie O'Grady (20th Century-Fox) sumptuously swaggers into Manhattan's Technicolored past (circa 1880) in which Miss Grable plays a music-hall queen from London named Madeleine Marlowe. Madeleine's betrothal to a Duke (Reginald Gardner) is mucked up by cover articles in the Police Gazette which unmask her as the onetime toast of Brooklyn Burlesque, Rosie O'Grady. Rosie wreaks vengeance upon Police Gazette Journalist Sam McGee (Robert Young) by telling the rest of the press that he has wooed her for her fortune. She gets him fired. Journalist McGee gallantly retaliates by popularizing the Sweet Rosie O'Grady song and by publishing an account of their mythical affair. Soon they are really in love.

Meanwhile decorators and Technicolorists indulge in rich reproductions of Delmonico's restaurant, the Hotel Brevoort, Barney's, a beer garden. There is also much dancing, and singing of such deathless ditties as Rosie, Waiting at the Church, Two Little Girls in Blue, plus the new catchy Goin' to the County Fair and the sure-fire My Heart Tells Me (which Miss Grable, enjoying her first bath on the screen, sings from a tall wooden bathtub--see cut).

Robert Young's limp sideburns evoke the period as sharply as the best of the sets. Adolphe Menjou and Reginald Gardner are atmospheric. The fact that Cinemactress Grable's histrionic legs are here shrouded in fancy skirts may sadden her admirers. But she makes up for that in one high-stepping number which has something of the shock value that might result from watching grandma, in the bloom of her youth, chuck an old rip under the chin with the toe-point of her slipper.

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