The New Pictures

The Blue Gardenia (Warner) cooks up a better-than-average whodunit out of some rather commonplace movie ingredients: a dead artist (Raymond Burr), a beautiful murder suspect (Anne Baxter), and a dynamic newspaper columnist (Richard Conte) who solves the crime.

The somewhat wilted plot manages to take on an unaccustomed bloom in Fritz Lang's direction and the acting of an adept cast. Director Lang tells his story mostly with the camera, and gives the picture a brisk pace that helps conceal its slack spots. Anne Baxter makes a thoroughly attractive murder suspect, and Richard Conte as the newsman is such a demon columnist that he apparently never even has to bother to write a column.

Call Me Madam (20th Century-Fox), the 1950 Broadway hit musical, has become a handsome, hilarious, surefire hit movie. Ethel Merman struts and shouts her way through her original stage role as a diamond-in-the-rough lady ambassador. Irving Berlin's catchy score is practically intact (dropped: the topical I Like Ike; added: Berlin's 1913 The International Rag and his 1940 What Chance Have I with Love?). At its Technicolored best--with Walter Lang's zestful direction, Robert Alton's dances and a topnotch supporting cast--the movie is a bouncier, better show than it was on the stage.

Call Me Madam is "a story of the past--1951. It takes place in two mythical countries. One is called Lichtenburg--the other, the United States of America." As the show begins, folksy Washington Hostess Mrs. Sally Adams (Ethel Merman), a lady not unlike Minister to Luxembourg Perle Mesta, is taking her oath as U.S. Ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Lichtenburg. In Lichtenburg, almost everybody--including Princess Vera-Ellen, Foreign Minister George Sanders and Press Attache Donald O'Connor--seems willing to break into a song or a dance at the drop of a cue. There are some plot complications about an American loan to Lichtenburg, but politics yields mostly to gags, pratfalls and love. By the fadeout, Madam Ambassador has not only won the Order of Lichtenburg (which entitles her to be called a Dame--a promotion from Madam), she has also won Lichtenburg's handsome Diplomat Sanders.

The picture gives Donald O'Connor, as the irrepressible press attache, an opportunity to display his pleasant singing voice and limber legs. It also gives veteran Movie Villain George Sanders a chance to play a romantic role for a change, which he does attractively, and to sing for the first time on the screen in an agreeable lyric bass voice.

But best of all the movie captures on film the special talents of Ethel Merman. In her first picture since the 1938 Alexander's Ragtime Band, the trumpet-voiced queen of Broadway musicomedy annexes Hollywood as well. From the opening scene, she sparkplugs the picture with a powerhouse personality. When she is in front of the camera--kicking at her train and tugging at her girdle before a royal reception, or holding a running phone conversation with "Harry" about Bess's health and Margaret's press notices--the show never has a chance to lag. When she lets loose full power with such tunes as Can You Use Any Money Today? and The Hostess with the Mostes' on the Ball, with every syllable loud, intact and sharply enunciated, Ethel Merman is undeniably the songstress with the mostes'.

For years, Hollywood has seemed unable to make effective use of Ethel Merman, who was once Ethel Zimmerman, a $35-a-week New York City stenographer. She has appeared in a number of second-rate movies (the best: the 1936 Eddie Cantor musical Strike Me Pink. One of the worst: the 1936 movie version of her own Broadway hit Anything Goes). But the moviemakers, fearing that the rowdy Merman personality was too strong for the 'screen, usually tried to tone it down.

When she arrived at the studio to begin Call Me Madam, she finally had a film tailored to her dimensions. She also got the A-1 Hollywood treatment, including Betty Grable's sumptuous dressing room and Ace Cameraman Leon Shamroy. She was told to be herself.

The Merman specialty is a brassy, high-hearted dame who is loud but likable. Her first (1930) Broadway success, Girl Crazy, cast her as a honky-tonk singer who electrified audiences by shouting I Got Rhythm and Sam & Delilah. Since then, in ten hit shows, she has played an assortment of lady racketeers, nightclub operators, predatory movie stars and female sharpshooters with such names as Reno Sweeney, Nails O'Reilly Duquesne, Panama Hattie and Annie Oakley. Her songs have had such evocative titles as I Get a Kick Out of You, Eadie Was a Lady, Katie Went to Haiti and You Can't Get a Man with a Gun.

Critics, fumbling for words to describe her, have called Ethel a combination of brass band and female wrestler, have suggested that she has an electric eel somewhere in her ancestry. At 44, she is a trimly plumpish 5 ft. 5, with an oval face, round brown eyes and a generous mouth. The brassy contralto with which she has been captivating musicomedy-goers for 23 years is natural, untrained ("I breathe when I want to"), and has on occasion reminded listeners of a steam calliope and of a train announcer aiming his announcements at a man with a head cold.

One reason she gives pleasure to her listeners: she sings as if she enjoys the music and believes in the songs. ("I'm doing just what I want to do, that's all"). George Gershwin liked to play the pit orchestra piano during the run of Girl Crazy just to accompany her when she tore into his I Got Rhythm. Cole Porter has called her "the most efficient songstress" in show business. Irving Berlin says that it would be professional suicide for him to write a bad song for Ethel Merman for the simple reason that her strident voice carries every word to the farthest theatergoer in the second balcony.

If Call Me Madam enjoys the screen success that seems assured, Ethel Merman may bypass Broadway for a while and devote herself to movies. By doing one picture a year, she would not have to be absent too long from her ten-room duplex apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, where she lives with her parents and her two children, Ethel, 10, and Robert, 7 (she was divorced last year from Newspaper Executive Robert Levitt). Her next picture, to start in July: There's No Business Like Show Business, in which she will again be teamed with Irving Berlin and Director Walter Lang. The movie will be filmed in Fox's new wide-screen Cinemascope, which gives an illusion of three-dimension. But it is doubtful that 3-D has anything at all to add to Ethel Merman's dynamic screen personality.

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