The New Pictures

Without Reservations (RKO Radio) rescues Claudette Colbert from the whale-boned dignity of her recent mother-with-grown-children roles, brings her back again as the giggly, harebrained, pratfalling heroine of a romantic farce. In this highly specialized type of film, Veteran Colbert excels. The screwball love story was excellent entertainment when she first tried it back in 1934 (It Happened One Night). It is still surprisingly good--and so is Claudette.

Once the plot's unlikely major premise is swallowed, the rest is easy: Claudette, looking as luscious as ever in her Adrian getups, is a loveless lady novelist who knows practically nothing about men. Wide-eyed, she boards a train for Hollywood to help in the filming of her smash bestseller. Who should turn up as fellow travelers but Marine Captain John Wayne and Lieut. Don DeFore.

Claudette lifts her curly lashes, takes one long look at Captain Wayne and--wham! Here's the real-life double of her own fictional hero. She yearns to tell him who she is and offer him the lead in the projected film. But the outspoken Captain has read her novel, thinks her hero is a thoroughgoing jerk.

At about this point, Claudette and her two Marine friends drift into an oldtime, lickety-split movie chase. The untiring, juvenile monkeyshines of the three unmistakably mature principals keep reminding you that their combined ages must total something over a century.

But Without Reservations is a pleasure to watch because it is written, directed and played with uncommon competence. Director Mervyn LeRoy, another seasoned Hollywoodman, knows that the first thing a good movie must do is move. Result: the film has the rare virtues of sustained mood and sustained pace.

The Bride Wore Boots (Paramount) is a depressing little example of what can happen to a romantic farce when it is mauled by inept hands. Plainly designed as an airy, sophisticated yarn, the film follows the marital ups & downs of Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Cummings. After seven years of marriage, they are the parents of two healthy, handsome and singularly bad-mannered children.

Barbara is crazy over horses; Robert likes antiques. Almost against his will, Robert keeps kissing a pretty girl (Diana Lynn) and Barbara is not amused. By reaching greedily for both realism and farce, the picture loses at both ends and rapidly falls apart in all directions. The solemn scenes emerge as tiresomely trivial. The comedy scenes, by contrast, are disquieting: they manage to characterize the hero and heroine as fairly unpleasant young people with oddly frivolous notions about earning a living, adultery, practical joking, simple decency and the training of young children.

Other than script and direction trouble, the picture's chief drawback is its disastrous miscasting of Barbara Stanwyck as a featherweight. Her no-nonsense personality jars a skittery light comedy right off its fragile moorings. When Barbara slips into a filmy negligee and begins to thresh about a hotel bedroom with her leading man, it is impossible to remember that she is supposed to be just kidding around.

The Dark Corner (20th Century-Fox) is a sort of Hollywood marriage of Laura (epigrams and lethal whams) and Murder, My Sweet (thugs, drugs and hugs). The alliance is not a perfect match.

Mark Stevens is Hollywood's newest "private eye." Framed by his partner (nylon-smooth Kurt Kreuger), he spends two years in jail. Released, he forgives & forgets, opens" a new detective agency in Manhattan--and is forthwith framed again. Kreuger is murdered (by Triggerman William Bendix on orders of Esthete Clifton Webb) in Stevens' flat. Dazedly, Stevens & Friend Lucille Ball go out to find the murderer before the police find the victim. They do, but not before clumsy editing diminishes the high natural suspense.

Happily, the editors spared some good bits & pieces: a literally juicy murder; a demand for $200 to leave town, translated as "I need a coupla yards--for powder money"; a Clifton Webb observation that if the murdered man loathed a certain woman "he loathed her intimately."

CURRENT & CHOICE

A Night in Casablanca. The maniacal humor of the Marx Brothers, uneven but more than adequate (TIME, May 20).

Cluny Brown. Ernst Lubitsch puts Jennifer Jones, Charles Boyer and an excellent cast through the hoops of British snobbery (TIME, May 20).

The Blue Dahlia. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in Raymond Chandler's tight-as-a-drumhead melodrama (TIME, May 13).

Toscanini: Hymn of the Nations. Film debut of one of the greatest living artists (TIME, April 29).

Henry V. Laurence Olivier's beautiful production of Shakespeare's play (TIME, April 8).

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