The New Pictures

Kiss and Tell (Columbia), from the Broadway hit play of two years ago, makes it fairly plain that parents cause more trouble than they're worth. But the film preaches so good-naturedly to its text that even parents shouldn't mind putting the price of admission in the plate.

As in Romeo and Juliet, an innocent situation is all gummed up by the old folks--the feuding Archers and Pringles. The Archer boy (Scott Elliott), an Air Forces lieutenant, elopes with the Pringle girl (Virginia Welles)--secretly, in deference to the feud. When he ships overseas, his younger sister, Corliss (Shirley Temple), mixes in the intrigue and is spotted sneaking her sister-in-law into the obstetrician's. Shirley quixotically claims the pregnancy for herself and names her moony boyfriend (Jerome Courtland) as the reluctant father. What happens from that point on makes one of the year's fastest and funniest comedies.

Kiss and Tell is especially notable for the work of three young people who combine the homespun qualities of the kid next door with the zany hilarity of the Marx Brothers. One is Darryl Hickman, who plays the omnipresent Pringle moppet. Another is the gawky Courtland, a deadpan, loose-jointed adolescent who can get a laugh by just saying: "Holy cow!" But the most expert of all is Shirley Temple herself, now a first-rate comedienne and a very attractive young lady. While spending her early teens in comparative obscurity, Shirley forgot none of the tricks that once made her the cinema's most dreaded scene thief.

The New Shirley. Since her recent marriage to Army Sergeant John Agar, who has returned to camp after a brief honeymoon, Shirley has attracted more attention than ever from cinemaddicts.

Now back home with her family in their plushy Beverly Hills home, she is leading the life of any normal, wealthy 17-year-old Californian: hobnobbing with her former school friends and enjoying the Santa Monica beach. She will soon start work on a remake of Little Women.

Shirley has never picked up Hollywood's' "sophisticated" speech and manners. Her make-up is sparing, and she still talks in the schoolgirl idiom: "I think it's super." Experts agree that Shirley has a good many happy years ahead--either in or out of the movies.

Weekend at the Waldorf (MGM) is Grand Hotel in modern dress. Hollywood has already earmarked it "pure box office," a term meaning that no matter what happens on the screen, the star-spangled cast is a cinch to make money. This is a very fortunate circumstance for MGM, since what does happen on the screen is not likely to hold anyone spellbound for the two hours and seven minutes that the film lasts.

Because she appears more frequently than the other players, Ginger Rogers at tracts the most attention, as a super-tense film celebrity whose, fame & fortune has brought her nothing but loneliness. But there are half a dozen other competent performers who plow their way through this three-day ordeal in the rooms and corridors of Manhattan's famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Lana Turner, one of the hotel's public stenographers, yearns so deeply for a Park Avenue apartment that she is willing to accept it on practically any terms. Van Johnson is a wounded airman who camps on Lana's trail with a woebegone, puppylike expression. Walter Pidgeon is a war correspondent who spars playfully with Ginger over a fancy elaboration of the old mistaken identity gag. Edward Arnold snorts and bellows through his assignment as a crooked oil dealer trying to fleece some turbaned Arabs. Even Robert Benchley, as a dandified columnist, has a hard time earning his laughs in this slow-moving mixture of slapstick and romance.

Weekend's juicy take will undoubtedly harden some of Hollywood's impresarios in their immoral conviction that you don't have to make good pictures to make good money.

Mildred Pierce (Warner) is adapted from James M. Cain's tough, tawdry novel about a middle-class housewife who is willing to do anything--including murder--to provide pretty things for her selfish little she-wolf of a daughter. But the movie turns out to be just another tear-sodden story of Mother Love.

In Hollywood's files, where everything must be tidily pigeonholed, the recent adaptation of his novelette, Double Indemnity, into a successful film has apparently put Author Cain in the category of a mystery writer. Thus, Mildred Pierce also emerges on the screen as a whodunit.

In the opening sequences, shots crack out in a well-upholstered living room, and a man in a dinner jacket staggers forward and falls dead on the carpet. In no time at all, Mildred Pierce (Joan Crawford) is in the police station telling her story in a series of flashbacks over the shoddy road she has traveled: first as a deserted wife, then as a waitress in a lunchroom, and eventually as owner of a fleet of Southern California's classiest drive-ins. Her sordid reminiscences show her as an unhappy, ambitious woman who is wronged by everyone she loves: a philandering husband (Bruce Bennett), a crooked business partner (Jack Carson), an unscrupulous playboy (Zachary Scott), a predatory daughter (Ann Blyth).

All this is good melodrama and fair entertainment, but it is much closer to the waltz-time schmalz of Kathleen Norris than to the fox-trot brass of James M. Cain.

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