The New Pictures, Aug. 27, 1945

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Miss Fitzgerald was now well-foundered in that strange limbo where it is far worse to have started brilliantly and to have slopped off, than to be just starting; where everyone, forgetting what went wrong and why, assigns it simply to lack of ability; where it is silly to thionk of getting a release from a strangling contract; where boredom, frustration and hopelessness conspire against the will until as she says, "all you can hope for is that sooner or later you will hit bottom...." She hit bottom in the appalling Ladies Courageous (TIME, April 3, 1944).

Artist's Salvation. When her friend Joan Harrison offered her the role of Lettie, Miss Fitzgerald wanted no part of it. ("You can see," she says, "I plan my career very carefully.") She knew it was a good role, but she disliked it.

Robert Siodmak sold it to her— as an artist's duty toward a good piece of work, likeable or not. When she finally got into the part she fell in love with it. She feel so hard that the Director Siodmak, whose worries about Hayes Office approval must have been a little like a man wondering how Queen Victoria would take to an off color joke, had to tone down her performance. But despite all precautions, Miss Fitzgerald's salvation from limbo gleams handsomely through the Hays.

Over 21 (Columbia) takes the sad case of a newspaper editor (Alexander Knox) who joined the Army in order to be worthy to write about the postwar world, and proves beyond dispute that men of 39 compete with men of 21 at the risk of their sanity and whatever physique the years have left them.

First, the editor's wife (Irene Dunne), a Hollywood playwright, sets up light housekeeping in an extremely lightly assembled cottage near his Miami officer-candidate school; she sees him only spasmodically, when he sprints in, gasping for a change of socks and psychoses. Then the editor's boss (Charles Coburn), a pitiless character interested in nothing except steaming copy, adds his own kind of harassment, first by long- distance, later in person. Adding to the reeign of horror are the editor's commanding officer (Charles Evans) and his terrifying wife and mother-in-law. Dropping in one afternoon for cocktails, this formitable trio stages the year's funniest social fiasco.

At the end of all this farcical rope, the editor hangs up the picture in a heartfelt editorial. By this time Over 21 has developed most, if not all, of the cinema possibilities in Actress-Author Ruth Gordon's original stage play.

That moderately successful comedy, besides being semiautobiographical, was supposed to have echoed, faintly at least, the fuming sincerity of PM's Ralph Ingersoll and the virtually unduplicable wit of Dorothy Parker. Miss Gordon was well qualified to reverberate the Parker echoes. Miss Dunne, despite her own kinds of charm and humor, is not. Mr. Knox, whose youthful appearance will surprise those who have seen him only in the title role of Wilson* is superb as the editor, whether chattering at the edge of mental exhaustion, or putting all possible gusto into a reading of a post-Wilsonian editorial. Good shot: the commanding officer's patronizing offer to help his hosts extract a frozen ice tray, and the cataclysmic result.

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