The New Pictures

Desk Set (20th Century-Fox). At long last, somebody has a kind word for the girls in the research department. The word: one of those electronic brains could do the job much better and with less back chat--and what's more, it would free the girls' energies for the more important job of getting a man.

Based on William Marchant's 1955 Broadway comedy about the milder terrors of technological unemployment, Desk Set has been expanded by a sizable pigeonhole, in which Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy intermittently bill and coo. Actress Hepburn is the head researcher for a TV network, the kind of girl who always knows the score but seldom seems to make one--especially with Gig Young, a rising young executive who can't seem to remember he is supposed to be falling for Katie. But then along comes Tracy, a "methods engineer" who seems determined to fire the heroine in both senses of the word. He steals her job and gives it to a young lady named Emmy--short for Emmarac. which is short for Electro-Magnetic Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator--but at the fade it turns out he has only stolen her heart.

On the whole, the film compares favorably with the play. The scriptwriters, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, have added some happy touches of silly business. And though Actress Hepburn tends to wallow in the wake of Shirley Booth, who played the part on Broadway, she never quite sinks in the comic scenes, and in the romantic ones she is light enough to ride the champagne splashes of emotion as if she were going over Niagara in a barrel. Spencer Tracy has one wonderful slapstick scene, and Gig Young does very well with a comic style for which he is much beholden to William Holden. But the real star of the show is Emmy. What redblooded moviegoing male will be able to resist the seductive lisp with which she murmurs pocketa. and ever so tenderly, queep? Indeed, what husband will not yearn for a female he can shut up, simply by not asking questions?

The French They Are a Funny Race

(Gaumont; Continental) is an American's idea of a Frenchman's idea of an Englishman's idea of France. The American is Director Preston Sturges, a comic genie (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) who was popped back in the bottle by Hollywood some years ago, but who recently popped out in Paris, where he made this film. The Frenchman is Journalist Pierre Daninos and the Englishman is Major Thompson, the hero of The Notebooks of Major Thompson (TIME, Sept. 26, 1955), a collection of Daninos' sometimes hilarious feature stories that has sold more than half a million copies in Europe and the U.S. To turn this rag, tag and bobtail of epigram, anecdote, whimsy and general small beer into a movie was, according to Sturges, "like trying to make a film of the telephone directory." But, except for a few wrong numbers, Director Sturges has done the trick with a controlled crack. pettiness that will take many moviegoers back to The Great McGinty (TIME, Aug. 26, 1940) and even farther back to the bladder farces of silent days.

Indeed, TFTAAFR is to all intents and purposes a silent film. Most of the time the actors play in pantomime, and the sound track is occupied by an off-screen voice which bears the same relation to the film as an M.C. to a series of blackouts. At least half the movie is made up of wacky little vaudeville routines, in which a stock Englishman and a stock Frenchman alternate the pratfalls. Major (ret.) William Marmaduke Thompson, C.S.I., D.S.O., O.B.E. (played by Jack Buchanan, the British George M. Cohan), is a cuff-shooting old harrumph who has left his best years East of Suez. Monsieur Taupin (played by Noel-Noel, a comedian who looks like a French edition of the late Robert Benchley) is a middle-aged owl with a skid-mark mustache who leaps at every idea, flailing with all extremities, as though it were a mouse to be torn limb from limb.

Each of the skits considers an aspect of the French (and occasionally of the British) national character with the sort of inane intensity a small boy devotes to a wart. Items: French Suspiciousness, British Weather. The Cult of the Liver among Middle-Aged Frenchmen, The Function of the Horse in Anglo-Saxon Courtship Patterns. There is a marvelous visual essay on the ricochet principle in Gallic traffic, and the now-familiar comic scene in which a British mother gives her daughter some moral aspirin on her wedding night: "I know, my dear, it's disgusting. But . . . just close your eyes and think of England!"

Between the acts, the script studies the problem of cultural rapprochement as it develops in the Anglo-French alliance between the major and his second wife

(Martine Carol). The major sees no problem at all. "The French," he notes contentedly, "devote to love the care we [British] bring to making tea." His wife, however, experiences a certain tension every time she looks at the head of the water buffalo mounted above their marriage bed, or hears the hearty English governess, one Miss ffyfth, encouraging their son at his barbell exercises with the singing of Rule, Britannia.

Old jokes, but as Sturges tells them they get a fresh and hearty laugh--especially when the director puts his best foot forward and doesn't put all his weight on the arch.

The Little Hut (MGM) tries to make the moviegoer believe that when three men are marooned on a desert island with Ava Gardner, nobody does anything but talk. The point of Andre Roussin's Frenchy little farce, and the reason the play ran for four years in Paris and three in London, was that even on a desert island it is possible for a man to be "civilized"--i.e., share the wealth, even when his only asset is a wife. In the play the heroine made the merry most of her polyandrous predicament, but poor Ava gets less bed than bored. Her husband (Stewart Granger) is interested in other things, and her would-be-wooer (David Niven) appears too vague to know what he wants. The only other man on the island is (or seems to be) a savage who can say nothing but "Boola!" In fact, the most interesting thing anybody can find to say is, "Now let me see, is there anything IVe forgotten to do before I turn out the light? H'm. No, I don't think so. Good night, dear!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.