Facing the Music

Red Garters (Paramount) is probably the first musical in history in which the music can hardly be heard because the Technicolor is so loud. The first scene is all yellow--egg yellow; the sky is yellow and the earth is yellow. Apparently the studio is trying to get across the point that it is a clear day.

The next scene is decorator's red, the next ultramarine blue, and so merrily on around the color wheel until the audience is almost too dizzy to realize that Red Garters is a snappy little spoof of cowboy pictures. Jack Carson plays the sow-bellied sheriff, Rosemary Clooney the lady known as Cal. Guy Mitchell is the man on the white horse, Gene Barry is the hombre on the black. Pat Crowley wears the gingham and blinks purty-like. There are a few harmless songs, some lively skedaddling by the dancers, and everybody seems to be enjoying himself. An O.K. picture, but it helps to be colorblind.

Top Banana (Harry Popkin; United Artists) brings Comedian Phil Silvers to the screen in a literal photograph of his long-running Broadway burlesque of burlesque. The sad truth seems to be that burlesque is a delicate flower: it needs a little dirt to grow in, but the censors, in this case, have carted away what little there was. Nonetheless, Comedian Silvers manures his garden energetically with the few faintly smelly old stories he has left (She: "I'd do anything to get into television." He: "It's not that easy.").

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