Monday, Jan. 17, 1955

Also Showing

Deep in My Heart (MGM) stars Actor-Dancer-Singer-Comic Jose Ferrer in the life story of Composer Sigmund Romberg. As Ferrer plays him, Romberg is just Ferrer with a Viennese accent. When the story begins, in 1911, Romberg is a piano player in a Manhattan restaurant belonging to Anna Mueller (Helen Traubel); when it ends he has made the big time. This thread of a story sews together some patches and snatches from Romberg shows (Maytime, The Desert Song, etc.), most of them super-duper production numbers. Among the performers: Rosemary Clooney, Gene Kelly, Jane Powell, Vic Damone, Cyd Charisse, Howard Keel, Tony Martin. All the same, 132 minutes of spectacle is more than any audience can comfortably watch, and it takes all of Ferrer's electric charm and versatility to keep the moviegoer looking at the screen.

There's No Business Like Show Business (20th Century-Fox) is another picture that does a lot of big-name-dropping --Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Donald O'Connor, Mitzi Gaynor, Marilyn Monroe and Johnnie Ray--and some of the names drop with a big thud. The show is an Irving Berlin potpourri, containing some good old sweetmeats along with a few fresh-picked sour apples. The mixture will probably simmer steadily at the box office, even though fussy moviegoers feel they have reached the Berlin point. Singer-Dancer Mitzi Gaynor has a figure that suggests a finely machined set of ball bearings, becomingly encased, and Marilyn Monroe will undoubtedly singe the eyebrows off front-row patrons in her Heat Wave number, in which she bumps and grinds as expressively as the law will allow.

Three-Ring Circus (Paramount) has Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis selling frozen custard at the circus. Customers crowd around. All at once the bung blows out of the custard vat. Splat! Barrages of goo go glugging in all directions. Jerry tries to plug the hole with his fist. Fffffttt! His feet go silly on the slimy stuff, and down he slathers. "Helpfllgrrulp!" As he opens his mouth to holler, a stream of sweet bilge hoses down his esophagus. In a matter of seconds everybody in sight is wallowing gloriously in orange muck, and the whole scene looks like nothing so much as a Bruegel landscape dipped in batter. The trouble with Three-Ring Circus is that this scene lasts only two minutes, while the rest of the picture lasts 102.

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