Facing the Music

Here Come the Girls (Paramount) casts Bob Hope as "the world's oldest living chorus boy." He thinks when he is asked to stand in for the leading man (Tony Martin) that at last he is flying high. Actually, he is just a sitting duck for "The Slasher," a fine comic heavy (Robert Strauss) who gnaws at his lines as if they were ripe black betel nuts. The whole thing is unfortunate for Singer Rosemary Clooney, who is still new to pictures. Almost every time she opens her mouth to sing, Hope shoves a gag in it.

Walking My Baby Back Home (Universal) is a musical with its brains in its feet. The feet, young Donald O'Connor's, are clever enough to weave their way through any reasonably foolish script. But in this picture, Dancer O'Connor is tangled in at least a half-mile of celluloid that should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The love interest: Janet Leigh, in a sweater. The whole thing ends with a sort of death rattle: a concert of "symphonic Dixieland" that seems better calculated to finish jazz than to revive it.

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