The New Pictures

Good News (MGM) was one of the best musicomedies of the 1920s. It is still one of the pleasantest to remember. Now, kept fairly strictly in its period, it has been brought to the screen. This fine idea might have been better carried out, but Good News is still better news than most.

The show's strongest asset, now as always, is its songs; they don't come much better than Lucky in Love, The Best Things in Life Are Free, Varsity Drag and the title song. The movie has a new tune, Pass the Peace Pipe, that is a fair measure of the towering excellence of the old ones. There is also June Allyson, who takes her work with such admirable seriousness that she makes even a flimsy musical role charming to watch. There is also the supercharged cuteness of Broadway's Dancer Joan McCracken, the crooning of radio's Mel Torme, and Peter Lawford, who is on his way to glory among the bobby-soxers.

The story, which is easy to enjoy as a parody, is about a football hero (Mr. Lawford), his devoted coed admirer (Miss Allyson), who is working her way through college, and a snobbish gold digger (Patricia Marshall), who is a little too free with her French, considering its quality ("Quel fromage,"' she mourns). Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who wrote the screen play, have loaded it with medium-accurate slang and period mannerisms and with smooth, medium-sophisticated comedy.

There is more than enough good humor and tunefulness to make Good News a pleasure. There isn't much of what it would take to make it one of the best movies of the 1940s--which it might have been. Those who made the picture ignored --or failed to understand--their opportunity to recapture the poignant flavor of a dead but well-remembered time. The dance routines, which might have been masterpieces of nostalgic mannerism, are merely crowded, noisy and shapeless. The good old tunes (and June Allyson) are the only first-rate items in Good News; and the chances are that the revived songs will be among the nation's most popular this winter.

Her Husband's Affairs (Columbia). Author Ben Hecht is capable of mischievous satire. In this farce about the backstairs relationships between science, publicity and business, Hecht and Co-Author Charles Lederer are up to quite a lot of tricks.

On the surface this is just a silly, mildly amusing story about an adman (Franchot Tone) whose protege, an old scientist (Mikhail Rasumny), whips together a chemical cream which removes whiskers instantly, without razor. The cream's further wonders are unpredictable and uncontrollable--as the victims of an over-impulsive publicity demonstration speedily learn. Practically every bigwig in Manhattan wakes up behind a foolish-looking beard; the wife of Big Business (Gene Lockhart) sprouts a creditable mustache, and the pate of the governor of the state turns to glass. As if this weren't enough, Mr. Tone and his wife (Lucille Ball) quarrel bitterly and almost continually, and he is unjustly accused of murdering the nice old scientist.

Meanwhile, Authors Hecht & Lederer, those snakes-in-the-grass, are busy at something a good deal more interesting. Directly and indirectly, always with malicious gaiety and sometimes with considerable bite, they expound the thesis that Science, Business, Publicity, Politics --all, indeed, save' Love alone--have one significant trait in common: unmitigated moral idiocy. The scientist, nicely played by Mr. Rasumny, is given specially tender attention. For once, a solemnly pretentious scientist is laughed at the way audiences at bum plays used to laugh at moth-eaten old Geniuses (who composed symphonies instead of the destruction of mankind). It is even made clear that, being an utter fool, the scientist is utterly innocent.

At its best, this film is a bracing editorial on atomic fission and the civilization which is saddled with it. Unfortunately, much of the satirical force is a little too well-concealed behind the bewhiskered surface farce; and the farce, despite its likable unpretentiousness and several easy performances, is pretty clattering and second-rate stuff.

This Time for Keeps (M-G-M). It would be a pleasure if this title could be taken at its word, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer can turn out pretty good musical pictures when it half tries. This one, however, is just one more of the standard brand, containing the following standard ingredients: amphibious Esther Williams, Jimmy Durante, Xavier Cugat, Lauritz Melchior, a juvenile who weighs less but can also sing (Johnnie Johnston), a few highly professional children, what seems an enormous amount of dull new popular music; an ending in which everybody treats everybody else in an unusually kindly manner. The story, in this case, is about an opera star's son (a war veteran) who doesn't want to be an opera singer and who has fallen in love with the star of an aquatic show, whose grandmother used to be an equestrienne.

Luckily, Jimmy Durante is a lovable performer and blooming Miss Williams is as easy to like as she is to look at. In Technicolor.

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