Facing the Music

The Benny Goodman Story (Universal) can be told in three words: dough re mi. It is not a very exciting theme, even when played by the most famed clarinet in the world. Benny (TV's Steve Allen) makes some fairly pleasant music with the help of the real E.G. on the sound track, along with Gene Krupa, Martha Tilton, Lionel Hampton, Ziggy Elman, Ben Pollack, Teddy Wilson and Kid Ory. But the licks are not quite so hot as they used to be, and the intermissions are stone cold. The only problem Goodman ever had, it would appear, was whether or not he should marry a million dollars (Donna Reed). And though E.G. has always been known as an inarticulate type, Actor Allen carries the caricature too far. He does little in the part but sidle and mumble as miserably as an uninvited guest who has just smashed the hostess' prize piece of T'ang pottery.

Carousel (20th Century-Fox). In the years between the wars, European audiences licked their lips over Liliom, the play by Ferenc Molnar. What they liked about its flavor was the salt. U.S. theater goers did the same over Carousel, the musical that Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein made from the play in 1945, but what they liked about its flavor was the sugar--the pretty pink icing of the plot, and most of all the sunny flowing honey of the lovely Rodgers tunes. The melodies have all their clovered freshness still, but if film fans lick their lips over anything else about this movie version of the Broadway musical, it will be because they can't tell sweet from saccharine.

The change in taste is partly a change in the times, partly a change in the medium. The distance of the stage lends enchantment to all sorts of trumpery things that cannot pass inspection under the mighty magnifying glass of the CinemaScope camera.

The Molnar-Hammerstein plot, in particular, shows its greasepaint complexion on the screen. Billy Bigelow (Gordon MacRae) is a carnival pitchman, and what he pitches best of all is woo. Underneath his brattitude, of course, Billy is a real home-cookin' kid--just the sort of wild bull that really wants a wedding ring in his nose. And, of course, he gets one. He chases a fresh-faced little New England factory girl (Shirley Jones) so hard that she catches him. Billy has lost his carnival job, but he is too big a man to take work on a filthy herring boat--though not too big to take a steady handout from his wife's cousin Nettie. When he learns that his wife is pregnant, Billy gets desperate, tries to steal the money he is too weak to work for, and is accidentally killed.'-He goes to heaven, or anyway to some sort of celestial vestibule in which he meets a benevolent old book keeper who lets him come back to earth for just one day to straighten out his ethical accounts.

In a word: goo. And Director Henry King has chosen to smear it pretty thickly on the screen. Goo is, of course, a major ingredient of every Hammerstein libretto, but in Oklahoma!, for instance--even in the movie version, which starred the same two singers (TIME, Oct. 24)--the sentiment was cut with a dash of comic bitters. In this production the players play it so coy that they sometimes seem close to baby talk. Actor MacRae sings pleasantly, though, and so do Shirley Jones and Robert Rounseville.

As a matter of fact, it is pretty hard for a singer to go wrong with such durable tunes as // / Loved You, What's the Use of Wonderin'? and June Is Bustin' Out All Over. The best performance in the picture, however, is given by Jacques d'Amboise of the New York City Ballet. He revives the tired style of dancing developed by Choreographer Agnes de Mille like a bucket of fresh water on a wilted stalk of corn.

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