Double Trouble

A lemon that has been squeezed is generally regarded as garbage. Not so in Hollywood. There the discarded lemon can be stuffed with colorful yegg and luscious tomato, wrapped in the right sort of cabbage, and served to the public as something called a rehash.

The Rains of Ranchlpur (20th Century-Fox), for instance, wades once more through The Rains Came, a story that is just as soggy today as it was in 1939. The main difference is that this time Lana Turner and not Myrna Loy is the girl who breasts the flood.

A U.S. heiress who has married a title (Michael Rennie), Lana is described by her husband as "greedy, selfish, decadent, corrupt"--by which he means that she has a roving eye. As the story begins, Lana goes flouncing off to India to pick up a stallion from a maharani's stable. Enter Dr. Safti (Richard Burton), an untouchable who has been educated in England, and pretty soon the twain are meeting under every deodar that could stand the trip to California. Maybe it's yoga and maybe not, but Lana suddenly realizes what she has been needing all her life. They decide to get married, but then there's that tiresome old Rennie, and besides there's the maharani (Eugenie Leon-tovich). The maharani, a lady of conventional morals, is against the match, and she obviously has a friend in the studio's special-effects department.

Clap goes the thunder, zing says the lightning, down come the rains, out goes the dam, wham goes an earthquake. Temples crash. A wall of water whirls the hero away. Fissures swallow tons of peasants, and the earth munches on them the way a cow chews oats. Lana, meanwhile, is hammering picturesquely on death's door as she battles a tropical fever, and as soon as she can walk she staggers, understandably enough, toward the nearest exit. She is apt to find it crowded.

Artists and Models (Hal Wallis; Paramount) is an alarming example of what can happen when a picture is remade too often. No matter how vigilant the studio, slight changes creep into each new version, until at last some producer makes a movie that is almost original. In this film, for instance, there is hardly anything left of its two Paramount predecessors except the old, reliable title. In fact, when Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis have finished their indefatigable routine, there is very little of anything left.

Jerry is introduced as a boy who got that way by reading horror comics. The idea may cause a serious drop in circulation for the screech sheets, but in the picture it brings a wacky rise in Dean Martin's fortunes. Jerry talks in his sleep, and what he reads all day he dreams all night--mostly about Zuba, a girl with three eyes, and something called Vincent the Vulture. Dean, a commercial artist, makes illustrations of Jerry's somnolo-quies, and sells them to a well-known pulp publisher (Eddie Mayehoff) for buckets of blood money, which the boys spend on two girls (Shirley MacLaine and Dorothy Malone). The girls may be hard for the moviegoer to identify because the camera seldom gets around to looking at their faces.

All goes monstrously well until Jerry dreams a secret formula ("X-34 minus 5-Ri plus 6-X36") that happens to be the same as one that is vital to the U.S. earth-satellite program. When the formula is published, the Feds move in, but the Reds strike first, and from there on out it's a simple question of "Menace, anyone?" The answer is no.

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