The New Pictures

Louisa (Universal-International) tries to find hilarity in the idea of a grandmother falling in love. When Spring Byington moves in with her son's family, she snaps at the maid (Connie Gilchrist), interferes with daughter-in-law Ruth Hussey's raising of the children, and quarrels about food prices with Grocer Edmund Gwenn. Appealed to by her son (Ronald Reagan), she sets out to make amends and, from her apology to Widower Gwenn, a romance blossoms. Her son's employer, Bachelor Charles Coburn, promptly appears as a blustering rival for her affections. All this foolishness allows a lot of tiresome variations on the theme of puppy love among the aged.

Though most of Louisa's arch humor misfires, seasoned Actors Gwenn and Coburn get some entertaining slapstick into their schoolboy posturings. Ronald Reagan and Ruth Hussey have little to do except exclaim about the way grandma is carrying on. As the daughter of the family, involved in a dreary little romance of her own, Piper Laurie plays a 17-year-old who seems to have matured every way except mentally.

Three Secrets (Warner) opens dramatically with the crash of a private plane on a mountain peak. The only survivor: the adopted five-year-old son of the plane's owners. While a rescue party toils up the cliff to rescue him, three women agonize at the foot of the mountain. Each of them --a Good Girl, a Bad Girl and a Career Girl--is convinced that the injured boy is her own son.

At this point, Three Secrets irretrievably slows down for a series of flashbacks culminating in the day the three unwed mothers placed their children for adoption at the same agency. Scripters Martin Rackin and Gina Kaus have written some juicy true-confession anecdotes to tell how woebegone Eleanor Parker was deceived by a marine; how News Reporter Patricia Neal abandoned her husband to gallivant around the world, and how temperamental Ruth Roman fatally bashed her betrayer over the head with a desk ornament. Of the men concerned in this welter of babies and pliant ladies, Frank Lovejoy is effective as a disenchanted husband and Ted de Corsia is all right as a philanderer's front man.

I'll Get By (20th Century-Fox) proves that age can mellow a song while simply mildewing a musicomedy plot. The picture is agreeable enough as a reprise of a dozen tunes that were popular ten years ago, but its account of the professional and romantic ups & downs of two struggling song publishers is a story that has grown old gracelessly.

The songs (e.g., I've Got the World on a String, It's Been a Long, Long Time, Taking a Chance on Love), enlist June Haver and Gloria De Haven, who perform proficiently as a sister team, and radio's Tenor-Comic Dennis Day, whose shrewd timing as an arrested adolescent makes him the movie's most valuable player. In the role of Day's publishing partner, William Lundigan labors unrewardingly with most of the plot chores.

As if its producers sensed the need for something extra to toss to the Technicolor camera, the picture rings in Dan Dailey, Harry James, Jeanne Grain, Reginald Gardiner and Victor Mature, all playing themselves in bit parts.

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