The New Pictures

Somebody Loves Me (Paramount) is a humdrum musical that strings 20 songs, including Way Down Yonder in New Orleans, On San Francisco Bay and Wang Wang Blues, on a story line "suggested" by the show-business careers of Husband & Wife Team Benny Fields and Blossom Seeley. According to the picture, popular Songstress Blossom (Betty Hutton) marries unknown Vaudevillian Benny (Ralph Meeker). But Benny resents being "Mr. Blossom Seeley," and insists on making good on his own before he does a duet with Blossom. With his wife's help, he finally makes the grade in the big time, and they exit triumphantly together singing the title tune.

Still active Benny Fields and his now-retired wife, who served as technical advisers on Somebody Loves Me, contend that the picture is "99% true." As written and played on the screen, their story comes out as the sort of life they might have led if Technicolor cameras had been looking on.

The Happy Time (Stanley Kramer; Columbia) is the time of growing up for twelve-year-old Bibi Bonnard (Bobby Driscoll) in the Ottawa of the '20s. The picturesque Bonnard family, headed by a kind, understanding papa (Charles Boyer) and strait-laced maman (Marsha Hunt), includes lovable, lecherous old grand-pere (Marcel Dalio), who chases after widows, Uncle Louis (Kurt Kasznar), who drinks vast quantities of white wine from a water cooler, and Uncle Desmonde (Louis Jourdan), a traveling salesman who collects ladies' garters.

When shapely Mignonette (Linda Christian) comes to work for the Bonnards as a maid, Bibi feels the first stirrings of sex. He steals a kiss from Mignonette while she is asleep. He is also falsely accused of drawing a suggestive picture at school. But all ends happily, with Mignonette and Uncle Desmonde in love, grand-pere getting out of his sickbed to continue his adventures, and Bibi putting on his first pair of long pants and kissing the little girl next door.

Adapted from Robert Fontaine's artlessly artful 1945 novel and the 1950 hit play of the same name, The Happy Time comes to the screen as a sort of Andy Hardy family of Canada. It substitutes slick film-making for the real wonder, strangeness and nostalgia of childhood, and a rather heavy-handed coyness for the lightheartedness of the original. The most genuinely human touch in the picture is provided by Charles Boyer's warm performance as papa, and his impassioned delivery of a lecture about the facts of life & love to wide-eyed Bibi.

Big Jim McLain (Wayne-Fellows; Warner) starts off with a documentary sequence of the House Un-American Activities Committee in session in Washington, D.C. From there, the picture goes on to some wildly fanciful movie melodrama. Big Jim McLain (John Wayne) and his partner (James Arness) are committee investigators assigned to dig up evidence about a Communist spy ring in Hawaii. Investigator Arness, who wants to destroy the ring by beating up the Reds every time he sights one, gets killed. Wayne, who takes on eight Communists singlehanded in a free-for-all, has to be rescued by the island police.

Between bouts, Wayne whiles away the time with brunette Nancy Olson and blonde Veda Ann Borg. Big Jim McLain has some pleasingly authentic Hawaiian background, but the action in the foreground is implausible and fumblingly filmed. Leathery John Wayne lopes through all the mayhem with the expression of a sad and friendly hound.

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