The New Pictures

Margie (20th Century-Fox) is good-natured spoofing of that doddering generation of oldtimers who have now reached their ripe, middle-aged 30s.

One day, while rummaging with her teen-aged daughter in the attic, Jeanne Grain, a 34-year-old mother, runs across an ancient phonograph record (Rudy Vallee's My Time Is Your Time) and a quaint old snapshot of something called a flagpole sitter. In heaven's name, mother (gasps the bobby-soxer), what was life like back in those funny, faraway times? Most of Margie is mother's flashback, Technicolor-and-music reminiscences of 1928.

This was Central High in the days of the Charleston and Button Up Your Overcoat, the days of goldfish swallowing, cloche hats, Herbert Hoover's first presidential campaign, rolled stockings and

Ain't She Sweet? This was the year when 16-year-old Jeanne had crushes on the captain of Central's football team and also on her handsome French teacher, the year when the debating society was her great pride and a broken bloomer elastic her great shame, the year of ice skating, theme writing, coonskin coats, and a senior prom that was the world's most breathlessly important event.

The makers of Margie had the good taste, good sense and steady hands to avoid cuteness, undue hokum and the extremes of either patronizing burlesque or sticky sentiment. The acting is restrained and sometimes touching, the color pleasant, the music nostalgic (Avalon, I'll See You in My Dreams, Three O'Clock in the Morning). As Jeanne's grandmother remarks somewhere in the story: "At your age, child, everything is wonderful." Margie's camera somehow manages to look at things with a 16-year-old's wonderful perspective. Oldsters now crowding 40 can be grateful to 20th Century-Fox for remembering 1928 that way.

The Strange Woman (Hunt Stromberg-United Artists), from a drugstore novel by Ben Ames Williams, takes its title and text from Scripture:

For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her month is smoother than oil: But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell. Proverbs 5:3-5

In the biblical sense of "strange," Hedy Lamarr is a strange woman indeed. In Bangor, Me., 1820, a bad girl had to be both beautiful and clever to get by with "strangeness." While the plot of The Strange Woman goes busily along assuming that the heroine is outrageously clever, Miss Lamarr's beautiful face never manages to express anything at all except its own uncommon beauty.

The hard-breathing story: Hedy lies and cheats her way into marriage with a rich old man (Gene Lockhart). Then she lures her husband's son (Louis Hayward) into patricide. Finally she is ready to steal a better looking man (George Sanders), who belongs to her best girl friend (Hillary Brooke). From the very beginning of these turgid, dragged-out, unconvincing carryings-on, it is plain that Miss Lamarr and her honeycomb lips will eventually wind up in Proverbial death and an Old Testament hell.

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