The New Pictures

Andy Hardy Comes Home (Fryman; MGM) might well bring the handkerchief industry out of the recession all by itself. For the first time since 1946, Mickey Rooney, now a ripening 35, has dusted off the old studio flats, put them all together and spelled not only MOTHER but all the other ingredients of smalltown nostalgia. It promises to be profitable: the first 15 of the hardy Andy episodes were among the most successful series in movie history, grossing $73,850,000 and making Child Star Rooney the nation's top box-office draw.

The story is the usual daffy maize. Andy, now a prospering lawyer working for a West Coast aircraft manufacturer, returns to the sleepy Midwestern town of Carvel to negotiate for a plant site. Judge Hardy (the late Lewis Stone) has long since died. But Mom (Fay Holden), Aunt Milly (Sara Haden) and sister Marian (Cecilia Parker) are still settin' in the comfortable chairs of that old white house on Ames Avenue.

The sight of home brings back memories of Andy's teen-age girl friends. While Rooney looks on with the sappy smile that age cannot erase, Director Howard Koch runs flashbacks, taken from earlier Andy Hardy movies, of Andy's puckered-up romances with Betsy (Judy Garland), Sheila (Esther Williams) and Cynthia (Lana Turner). Old friends crowd around, and the younger generation looks at this legendary man with proper awe. Old Buddy Beezy comes to the corporate rescue by offering a choice hunk of land near the old swimming hole for the airplane factory.

Then--the unthinkable. The townsfolk of Carvel turn on Andrew Hardy and circulate a petition to rezone the land to "keep Carvel just as it is." Despondent, sure to lose his job, Andy chokes up a sopping little farewell speech before a packed crowd at the city council meeting, then slopes off round-shouldered to pack his bags. Rooney fans who have to ask what happens next should be charged double admission. When it's over, instead of flashing the usual THE END on the screen, the film's producers own up to the obvious: TO BE CONTINUED.

The Reluctant Debutante (Avon; MGM) in its stage incarnation was the kind of drawing-room comedy that critics called "pleasant" for want of anything worse to say about it. But transferred to the screen and run through a high-speed Mixmaster of comic invention by Rex Harrison and Wife Kay (Les Girls) Kendall, this lukewarm cup of tea has been turned into cheery summer punch.

Comedienne Kendall glides like an angular jellyfish through the role of Lady Broadbent, an elegant snob who sets out to make Husband Rex's teen-age American daughter (by his first marriage) the toast of the London "season." The toast, Sandra Dee, takes a lot of buttering up. After dancing with bumble-footed toffs at her first ball, she murmurs in a beguiling Bronx accent, "They're all drips."

Nevertheless, Stepmother Kay determines that Sandra shall go overboard for a suet-mouthed Guardsman, despite the fact that he is much adored by Kay's best friend's wallflower daughter. (Coos Kay: "I do think she's wise not dancing all the time.") Instead, Sandra obstinately falls for a bounder (John Saxon). "First of all," says a friend in explaining Saxon's shortcomings, "he's half Italian." Second of all, he plays the drums in a society orchestra, and third, he is given to vividly detailed descriptions of African fertility dances.

The amorous kiddies take off for a night's nightclubbing. As Kay paces in the wee hours, Rex reaches philosophically for the brandy. "After all," he muses, "it isn't how much we drink that matters. It's how much she drinks." Actress Kendall herself, in the midst of preparing a lunatic scheme to trap the cad, pauses long enough to exclaim: "Isn't this tremendous fun!"

It is. William Douglas Home's screenplay, adapted from his own stage version, tinkles with a profusion of grace notes that, in skillful hands, can often substitute for a full score. The pace, thanks to Vincente Minnelli's direction, is Pall Mall. Comedienne Kendall cocks an eyebrow clear up into her hairline, twists her mouth into something resembling a berserk rubber band, fixes her rival with a saccharine smile that fairly oozes gore. Actor Harrison, whether falling asleep on his feet during the national anthem or grunting amorously to a sofa pillow, still reigns as king of his wacky parlor empire, but an enormously talented queen has moved in close to his side.

White Wilderness (Buena Vista) is the awesome product of three arduous summers and winters spent by eleven Walt Disney photographers in the Canadian and Alaskan far north. Their cameras caught enough to make any naturalist drool with delight. A polar bear plunges into the icy Arctic seas to give vain chase to a frisky seal; cocky bear cubs attack a one-ton walrus and drive him from his perch; a wolverine, nastiest of all far northern beasts, shrugs off the dive-bomb attacks of an osprey to climb a tall tree and devour a fledgling. Most impressive scene of all: Photographer James Simon found a colony of lemmings (mouselike rodents that breed prolifically) swarming in panic because of famine, filmed them as they scurried by the millions over a cliff into the sea.

But striking as the film is visually, Producer Disney cannot resist gilding it with sentiment. Twelve times in the past ten years he has sent teams of crack camera crews into the world's boondocks to record the behavior of lesser-known animals and plants. Twelve times, e.g., in The Living Desert, The Vanishing Prairie, the teams have returned with trunkloads of painstakingly gathered film, much of it unique. And twelve times Disney has taken the film and glued onto it a cloying narration and a sound track that often seems loudly superfluous. Even as the lemmings plunge crazily toward the ocean--a sight that needs no gratuitous comment of any sort--the orchestra swells to bursting and the voice of the narrator booms their gooey epitaph: "And so is acted out the legend of mass suicide . . . It is not given to man to understand all of nature's mysteries."

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