The New Pictures

Captain Eddie (20th Century-Fox) leaves ex-ace Rickenbacker (Fred MacMurray) and his companions adrift in the Pacific without food or water, to enlarge on the reasons for his certainty that they will be rescued, and his statement: "My whole life has been mixed up with machines." From time to time, the film returns to the castaways and ends with their rescue, but it is chiefly concerned with Rickenbacker's life up to World War I. About his exploits in that war, and his career between World War I & II, it is very sketchy. But what it has chosen to tell is told with a good deal of charm.

Eddie's father (Charles Bickford) loved and believed in machines as his son did. Eddie's mother (Mary Phillips) felt that machines were "against God and nature." This semi-mystical debate on the virtues of the machine, which underlies the whole picture, is soberly set forth but not very convincing. But much more of the film concerns the comedy of archaic machinery, and that comes off much better (with expert help from James Gleason as an auto salesman, Chick Chandler as a demon fairgrounds aviator, and Fred MacMurray as a grease monkey).

In reporting the courtship of the future Mrs. Rickenbacker (Lynn Bari), equally pleasant attention is given to the one-step, the waltz, even the schottische, to tunes like Too Much Mustard and Missouri Waltz. There is much easy fun with linen dusters, carbide headlights, rachitic engines and foozling radiators. For well-articulated comedy and for beauty of evocative detail, this is one of the pictures of the year.

The raft scenes are not so good. Mechanically, there are excellent moments: the initial crash, the soft, strangling sound of the plane as it founders, the angelic strangeness and beauty of the rescuing plane--a machine apotheosized. Other bits are finely conceived: the aching silence as a gull circles the starved men, its ghastly squeal when it is caught. And there are earnest, dignified performances, notably those of MacMurray, Richard Conte and Lloyd Nolan. Yet it is never quite possible to believe that the oceanic anguish is more than a stone's throw from all the food and drink Hollywood can provide.

Incendiary Blonde (Paramount) purports to record the life and raucous times of the late Texas Guinan (most famous of nightclub hostesses), whose battle cry ("Hello, sucker!") might be carved on a monument to the 1920's. Incendiary Blonde is not such a monument. It is a brassy synthesis of color, song and dance, spattered with laughs, sniffles and melodrama, and brought to life chiefly by vigorous, charming Betty Hutton. In its own way, it is a rather likable show.

Miss Guinan had three husbands in her day, but Paramount has dreamed up two hitherto unrecorded romances and a spate of misunderstandings for her. In the film the love of her life is a Mexican-Irish sport named Bill Kilgannon (Arturo de Cordova). He is ineligible for marriage since he already has an insane wife. But for a vaguely noble reason, he prefers to let Texas think he has jilted her. So she marries a press agent (Bill Goodwin). She throws him over when she learns how noble Cinemactor De Cordova has been, but they never manage to team up except as business partners and the best of friends in rodeo, cinema and cabaret. Later she has a fling at nobility herself by concealing the fact that she has not long to live.

Aside from the fact that this story is largely untrue and rather silly, it serves well enough as a clothesline for displaying the picture's real attractions: some highly skilled comedy from Barry Fitzgerald (as Miss Guinan's father), Charles Ruggles as an oldtime rodeo impresario and movie director; some broad but funny kidding of old movies. There are also swarms of production numbers and songs (It Had To Be You, Oh By Jingo, Darktown Strutters' Ball) in most of which Miss Hutton is triumphantly salient. And there is a nicely suspended climax, with gangsters muscling their way through a Guinan New Year's Eve party to rub out her man, while Texas desperately (if rather inexplicably) keeps the party going. Above all, there is Betty Hutton, who is not to be confused with Texas Guinan, but is quite a girl in her own right.

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