The New Pictures

Up In Arms (Goldwyn-RKO). Midway of Up In Arms, a couple of soldiers lean on a rail and gaze moonily down on a deckload of Army nurses. The nurses, the 34 most eye-straining creatures Sam Goldwyn could pick for the job, are sprawled about in revealing pastel playsuits. Says one of the soldiers reverently: "Boy! We didn't have anything like that in the last war." Says the other as devoutly: "We don't have anything like it in this war, either!"

The man responsible for this sort of eat-your-cheesecake-and-kid-it-too is Gagster Don Hartman, who put some of the trickiest comic curves into the Road to Singapore, Zanzibar and Morocco. The whole picture is easy, handsome, unabashed. It was a fantastic idea to festoon a completely unreal version of World War II around Comedian Danny Kaye. The result: one of the few pictures which seem to have been made for a huge audience of soldiers overseas, avid for such funny fare. (By month's end they will be seeing it.)

Danny Kaye, an elevator boy in a medical center, is also a one-man museum of imaginary maladies. He is wooed by redheaded Nurse Dinah Shore, whom he does not love, woos blond Nurse Constance Dowling, who loves his roommate. He does an uproarious rib of a Western musical, taking all parts, including that of the usher who keeps saying: "There will be a short wait for seats." Then Danny is drafted. En route to the South Pacific he sings the rapid-fire Melody in 4-F with the cold frenzy which only Danny Kaye can give it. Later he blunders into capturing some 20 Japanese and ends the picture as a hero.

Barring a few lapses of taste, Up In Arms is fun to watch, good to look at. Dinah Shore puts a lot of warmth into her characterization, a lot of heat into the songs Now I Know, Tess' Torch Song. But the heart, liver & lights of this cinemusical is Danny Kaye (of Broadway's Lady in the Dark and Let's Face It), making his screen debut. Kaye's mimicry, patter and general daftness are as deft as a surgeon's incision.

Funniest shot : Danny reading the famed invitation which begins: "Greetings from the President . . ." and flinching like a beaten boxer as, word by word, the draft summons talks at him in Franklin Roosevelt's velvety, fireside inflections.

Standing Room Only (Paramount) warms over the hectic humors of war-crowded Washington. Junior Executive Lee Stevens (Fred MacMurray) comes to Washington to wangle, from New Deal Bigwig Glen Ritchie, a contract to convert a languishing toy factory into an ordnance plant. With him comes fleshly, flashy, proletarian Jane Rogers (Paulette Goddard), who has flirted her way out of the firm's toy donkey department into a secretaryship. First night in Washington the roomless pair huddle miserably under the horse-belly of a Civil War monument.

Next day Mr. MacMurray tackles the Administration. He starts at the tail end of a waiting line which, each time the aspirants move up a chair, ripples like a weary centipede. At last Mr. MacMurray learns that Mr. Ritchie has just gone out.

To solve the housing problem, Secretary Goddard hires out her boss and herself as husband & wife, butler & cook, to browbeaten, glad-eyed Ira Cromwell (Roland Young), who is trying to make a home for his baritone wife (Anne Revere), a major in the PLOPS.* Later the pair take servant jobs with New Dealer Ritchie, outwit a sneering rival toymaker, cop the contract and each other.

The picture aerates a lot of its staleness with pace, surface wit, some crisp acting. As a henpecked satyr, Roland Young is still the alltime master of twiddle, the fatuous innuendo, the Britannic bleat. Fred MacMurray is an experienced cutup too. But some cinemaddicts may feel that Paulette Goddard is on the brink of overstatement when she exclaims: "Every time I see him I get weak in the knees."

CURRENT & CHOICE

The Purple Heart (Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, Sam Levene, John Craven; TIME, March 6).

Lady in the Dark (Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, Warner Baxter, Jon Hall; TIME, Feb. 21).

Lifeboat (Tallulah Bankhead, William Bendix, John Hodiak, Henry Hull, Walter Slezak, Canada Lee, Heather Angel; TIME, Jan. 31).

*Meaning: Paratroopers' Ladies' Office Personnel Services.

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