The New Pictures

Anchors Aweigh (M.G.M.), a shore-leave saga with music, dancing, and Technicolor's full palette, is easily the pleasantest couple of hours that can be bought currently in a movie theater. Its standard-bearers : Gene Kelly, a sailor fairly enough described as the Sea Wolf; his sidekick Frank Sinatra, a shy type but eager to learn; Kathryn Grayson, a movie extra who wants to become a famous singer; and Jose Iturbi, who is surprised but very nice about it when Miss Grayson, being kidded by the sailors, turns up for an audition.

It is a stock enough plot for a musical comedy, but there is nothing purely stock about the way it is told. The characters have a good deal of character, humor and likeableness (Sinatra mourns to Kelly: "Sometimes when I watch you, I got a feeling that there's something wrong with me"). Kelly dances beautifully and Sinatra sings the roof off. They seem genuinely concerned over their deception of the girl. They seem genuinely worried when they find their own affections setting them at odds -- a difficulty nicely solved, for Sailor Sinatra, by warmhearted Waitress Pamela Britton. And their four days' strenuous romancing is as rich as fruitcake with diversions and digressions. Among the best :

P:The gay, easy byplay between Kelly's rock-solid acting, which carries the show and is as sure as anything in pictures, and Sinatra's gently amateurish pseudo-goofiness, with its engaging echoes of Stan Laurel.

P:The lyrical songs What Makes the Sunset and I Fall in Love Too Easily, elegantly prepared for the I-walk-alone voice and manner--and Sinatra's unaffected, hypnotic singing of them.

P: Kelly's dancing--the first in movies to stand comparison with Astaire's.

P:Senor Iturbi's boogie-tinged recording, with full orchestra, of an extravagant tonal double-banana-split based on Donkey Serenade.

There are enough such specialties to sink a battleship. But they keep Anchors Aweigh paced, buoyant and prettily afloat.

Teen-Age Girls and Where's the Meat (MARCH OF TiME-20th Century-Fox) deal briskly and informatively with two wartime phenomena which have become national preoccupations. The teenage girl, multiplied by some six million, has become a consumer with a mind very much her own: an object of special interest to magazines, department stores, dress designers, model agencies, musicians.

Sociologists and psychologists seek her "expert guidance" and learn, from the filly's mouth, that she likes privacy, pinups, shelves for doodads, lolling interminably at telephones and in bathtubs. She also likes "slumber parties" (which are talkative rather than slumberous) with wolf-cubs whistling below the windows. She does not care to look old or sophisticated, uses simple cosmetics (but pays elaborate attention to shades of lipstick), and saves her dignity for formal dances. She reads much in magazines, little in newspapers or books. She is hep to new records and takes an occasional turn at baby-sitting for pocket money.

Clothes are so important that if you don't dress right (i.e., like everybody else) you "might as well be dead!" She might far better be dead, of course, than unpopular with other girls. She is "not in much of a hurry to grow up," yet essentially she is serious-minded. The teen-agers who give expert advice to the psychologists also advised the producers of this issue of MARCH

OF TIME. Their advice (and presence) assure the film its interest and value; after their suggested corrections had been made, they said of the film: "It's hep now."

Where's the Meat tells in considerable detail where it is, where it isn't and why it won't be. There are glimpses of black markets and worried men in Washington, of sharp practices in stores and on the range, and of the small local butcheries which have crammed quick-freeze lockers with millions of pounds of meat, much of it bought point-free, on the hoof.

The obvious conclusion: with the demand for meat almost twice the visible supply--despite the slaughter of cattle not fully grown--the best that can be done is not going to be good enough, for some time to come. The film's approach to the problem, accordingly, is humorous as well as instructive. Best bits of humor: glaring samples of the sycophantic treatment accorded that "pampered citizen," the local meat-retailer; almost lascivious shots of steaks and chops in all their old-fashioned glory, which might well be forbidden on grounds of mental cruelty to carnivorous America.

Don Juan Quilligan (20th Century-Fox), a study in the farcical consequences of bigamy, examines the temptations which beset a none-too-bright barge captain (William Bendix) at each end of the Brooklyn-Utica haul. In Brooklyn, Captain Quilligan falls for a barmaid (Joan Blondell) who laughs and sings just like his sainted mother (rest her soul). In Utica, he is hopelessly enmeshed by a homebody (Mary Treen) whose cooking is more wonderful than anything the captain has tasted in the ten years since mother passed on (rest her soul).

Tenderhearted as he is susceptible, the captain cannot bear to hurt the feelings of either woman, and is deftly bulldozed into marrying both of them. With the help of his relatively brainy first mate (Phil Silvers), he tries to keep both ends from meeting by inventing a twin brother. He also: 1) gets simultaneously involved in the Army and the Navy; 2) pretends suicide; 3) is arraigned as the murderer of his "twin." In the long run, through the kindness of Scripters Arthur Kober and Frank Gabrielson, he wiggles out of practically everything and sets off to serve his country, happy in the illusion that a sailor's life is unassailably monastic.

Splitting and redoubling its complications with the speed of a Stakhanovite amoeba, neat and artificial as a nest of concentric Chinese boxes, this hypersymmetrical rake's progress is as stylized in its performance as in its structure. It is more like a puppet show than a flesh & blood comedy, and its dialogue is in dialect as formal as the colloquy of Mandarins. The puppets often strike tableaux which have charm, irony and even beauty, of a kind. But it is a kind so rigid and remote from simple human warmth that honest laughs come few & far between. It is an unusual, skilful and singularly lifeless little picture.

CURRENT & CHOICE

G.I. Joe (Burgess Meredith, Robert Mitchum; TIME, July 23).

A Thousand and One Nights (Cornel Wilde, Evelyn Keyes; TIME, July 16).

Along Came Jones (Gary Cooper, Loretta Young; TIME, July 9).

Rhapsody in Blue (Robert Alda, Oscar Levant, Joan Leslie; TIME, July 2).

Blood on the Sun (James Cagney. Sylvia Sidney; TIME, June 25).

Murder, He Says (Fred MacMurray, Helen Walker; TIME, June 18).

Wonder Man (Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo; TIME, June 11).

We Accuse (Kharkov trials documen tary; TIME, June 4).

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