New Picture

Happy Anniversary (Fields Productions; United Artists) is a vulgar, slick, hilarious film version of Anniversary Waltz (TIME, April 19, 1954), a common mattress farce, put together by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields, that packed the Broadway tourists in for more than 17 months. The plot is just a house of comic greeting cards, but Chodorov and Fields, who also wrote the script, have stacked them up with impressive skill. David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor, it develops, are a big-city couple in the five-figure set who are celebrating their 13th anniversary. All goes well until Husband Niven gives his in-laws the likkered-up lowdown on what used to happen in that little old hotel before they were married. When the smoke clears, wife is locked in her bedroom, husband is battering down the door, and daughter is standing bare-kneed and pigtailed before a youth forum, telling the TV audience all about her parents' "premarital relations."

One way and another H.A. has its heehaws at just about all the going cliches of pseudo-sophisticated comedy--interfering in-laws, kindly bartenders, expense-account romances, television blurbs, know-it-all brats and the sort of progressive school that gives "two weeks off for Halloween." The dialogue is often gamy and the situations farce-fetched, but Director David Miller and his stars have made the most of some sharp wit-snapping.

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