Also Showing

California (Paramount) is a big, energetic Technicolored western about the 1848 gold rush. It should cause no particular pain to anyone, except possibly historians. Ray Milland is the sullen, unshaven hero. Barbara Stanwyck the hussy-with-heart-of-gold, Barry Fitzgerald the lovable old grape-growing philosopher, and George Coulouris the fine, fascist-minded villain.

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim (20th

Century-Fox) is a dragging, uninspired trifle in fancy dress about "women's rights" in the late igth Century. The plot consists of one pale joke (in the 18705, typists seem to have been referred to as "typewriters"). It isn't much fun -- despite the Technicolor, some hitherto unpublished Gershwin tunes. Dick Haymes's pleasant baritone, and Betty Grable's incomparable pin-up legs.

It's a Joke, Son (Eagle-Lion) brings radio's unreconstructible Senator Claghorn (Kenny Delmar) to the screen. The movie shows how he became a Senator despite his wife (Una Merkel), who also ran, and a bunch of Yankee-accented political gangsters. The Claghorn delivery rings out as nobly as the Voice of Bugle Ann. Visually the Senator is not so convincing, and his vehicle grates and clatters like loose buggy tires on a concrete pike.

Song of Scheherazade (Universal-International) is another of those amiable semi-burlesques in Technicolor which generally feature either beauteous Maria Montez jouncing down a stairway or beauteous Yvonne de Carlo dancing. This time it is Miss de Carlo's turn. A refined girl, she nevertheless heads the floor show in a tidy sort of Moroccan dive in order to support her mother (Eve Arden), a lady wastrel. She is rescued from these questionable surroundings by a sailor named

Nicky Rimsky-Korsakov (Jean Pierre Aumont). Nicky, it seems, is so crazy over music that he cannot notice girls, even if it rains girls. But during his brief shore leave, Miss de Carlo inspires him to compose Song of India, Flight of the Bumblebee, Hymn to the Sun and practically every other famed achievement of the composer's lifetime except his streamlining of Mussorgsky's Boris Godunoff. The Metropolitan Opera's Charles Kullman, as the ship's tenor doctor, sings some of the compositions; Miss de Carlo dances several more. There is also an energetic duel with whips. Miss Arden and ship's Captain Brian Donlevy look on as if they could think of far better things to do and say the minute the cameras stop. It is all very foolish and, thanks to a heavy undertone of parody, bearably amusing.

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