The New Pictures

Girl Crazy (M.G.M.) shows Judy Garland all buoyed up by Mickey Rooney. There are also Tommy Dorsey's band, which sets the pace for some stupefying dance routines, a comic girl (Nancy Walker) who talks like a Brooklyn Dodger in skirts, and a musicomic plot.

Mickey Rooney, an adolescent rakehell from the East, is sent west to Cody College for a semester in celibacy. Cinemactor Rooney is comically slapped around by cowboys and horses until he learns his lesson, saves the college from folding by staging a coeducational rodeo, wins the dean's niece (Judy Garland), and escorts her through a western omelet of dance routines to the strains of I Got Rhythm.

In his puppy days Mickey Rooney used to pain thousands and divert millions of cinemaddicts by obviously feeling as cocky as he acted. Now it is simply an act. He has acquired the detachment of a veteran vaudevillian. He is a natural dancer and comedian, and his little parlor tricks--especially one burlesque broadcast--are a pleasure to watch. Even better is Judy Garland. As sung by Cinemactress Garland, Embraceable You and Bidin' My Time become hits all over again, and the new But Not For Me sounds like another. Her presence is open, cheerful, warming. If she were not so profitably good at her own game, she could obviously be a dramatic cinema actress with profit to all.

One day in 1933 the three singing Gumm sisters arrived from their home at the edge of the Mojave Desert to play a week of vaudeville at Chicago's Oriental Theater. Their blood froze when they read the marquee legend: THIS WEEK GEORGE JESSEL and THE GLUM SISTERS.

George Jessel helpfully reminded them that even when spelled right their name sounded "too much like crumb, dumb and gum." He suggested that they cabbage the name of his good friend, then the New York World-Telegram's drama critic, Robert Garland. One Gumm sister, aged 11, decided to make a clean sweep. Hoagy Carmichael's Judy was a song she liked just then, so Frances Gumm has been Judy Garland ever since.

A Baby Nora Bayes. Her career happened to Judy even more chancily than her name. Late in 1934 she ended a solo engagement at Lake Tahoe's Cal-Neva Lodge, drove off with her mother but forgot her hatbox. When she went back to get it, a man asked her to sing for him. She was in a hurry, but graciously agreed. The man was Song Writer Lew Brown. With him was Agent Al Rosen. So impressed was Agent Rosen by Judy's singing that for fruitless months he lugged the child around the Hollywood studios while casting directors stopped, looked, cried "too young," and refused to listen. One day Judy gained the ear of M.G.M.'s Jack Robbins. He was so excited that he induced Louis B. Mayer to hear Judy personally. Reverently the great news was conveyed to her. Asked Judy: "Who's Louis B. Mayer?" Mr. Mayer listened to her anyway, and soon thereafter confided to an associate: "We have just signed a baby Nora Bayes." The baby is now Hollywood's 19th strongest box-office draw, M.G.M.'s seventh.

When Judy first turned up in 1935, Master Mickey Rooney, then just turned 15, took her in tow, showed her the ropes at the studio, squired her on picnics and to beaches. He always treated her as a child. He also treated her to endless raves about his latest girl. Judy worshiped him. When she was nervous about starting a scene in Love Finds Andy Hardy, her first big part, he kissed her roundly on both cheeks. He has been doing it ever since. But Judy, unimpressed by Rooney as romance, finds Rooney the man "wonderful, one of my closest friends."

The Rooney Wit. She even likes the Rooney ribbing and the Rooney wit. Well out of sight of the director, Mickey still mugs like a tic-ravaged chimpanzee in hopes that Cinemactress Garland will louse up the take with a laugh. An example of the Rooney wit occurred during the shooting of Babes in Arms. While Judy was catching a nap in her dressing room, Mickey planted a smoke-pot at the doorsill, bawled "FIRE!", and dashed a glass of water in her face as she sprinted out. Sometimes Miss Garland retaliates. When, making Girl Crazy, she appeared in white calfskins, Mickey quipped: "You look like a vanilla ice-cream cone." Miss Garland measured Mickey's scarlet-chapped 5 ft. 2 in., riposted: "You look like a rationed bottle of catsup."

What a Woman (RKO-Radio), thanks chiefly to Rosalind Russell and some arduous sleight of hand, juggles some well-timed laughs out of a timeless laughingstock--the brittle Career Woman who really needs a husband.

A super-talent scout (Rosalind Russell) is used to earning commissions as handsome as she is. But when the film begins she is having trouble locating a bunch of brawn adequate to .portraying The Whirlwind, hero of a best-selling romance which is rocketing screenward. In time's nick, she discovers that the book's author, a shy professor (Willard Parker), has just the physical architecture for the role. So she blandishes him into taking it, makes casual use of his infatuation with her to warm him up for the picture's love scenes.

Before long the girl-shy Whirlwind, drunk with love, is as friskily unmanageable as a brontosaurus in a bridal suite. (Good scene: his Dionysian rumba with exhausted Miss Russell in her apartment, to ear-cleaving radio music, deep in the night.) Meanwhile the Honest Man (Brian Aherne), who is writing Miss Russell's profile, loafs around with his hat jammed on (to prove he is a journalist), befriends the bemused Whirlwind, sneers at double-dealing Miss Russell, grabs her the instant she betrays a dawning sense of decency.

Outsized Newcomer Willard Parker, smooth Brian Aherne, some sharp dialogue and, above all, sharp Cinemactress Russell, who has the edgy glitter of black jet, help to keep this unlikely comedy likable.

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