The Fleet’s In (Paramount) is exactly what its title suggests: something to entertain the boys on shore leave. Some of this entertainment weighs around 120 lb., looks good and steps lively. The rest is a massive aggregation of singers, dancers, assorted entertainers (rubber-jointed Betty Hutton, et al.) and little Jimmy Dorsey’s molten musicians. The result is hot & cold, but makes a cheerful rushing sound.
It took seven writers to produce Fleet’s story—a prodigal waste of talent. A nice, homespun sailor (William Holden) inadvertently kisses a movie star, whereupon his battleship becomes the glamor ship of the U.S. fleet. To keep the flag flying, Sailor Holden is coerced into trying to kiss unbussable Dorothy Lamour, a dime-a-dancehall dame who loathes sailors. The Navy makes book on him. He kisses her all right, but it takes the whole picture.
Between rounds, The Fleet’s In manages to keep tuneful. It has seven new melodies, of which the best is Tangerine. They were composed by Victor Schertzinger, songwriter (Marcheta) and director (One Night of Love, Road to Zanzibar), who died of a heart attack while making the picture.
Remark of the season (Holden to Lamour): “I don’t want a glass of milk; I want you.”
The Male Animal (Warner) brings laconic Humorist James Thurber’s famed War-Between-the-Sexes to the attention of its biggest audience yet. This semi-ludicrous, semipainful combat, which Thurber wrote all the way into a Broadway hit (with Co-Author Elliott Nugent) two years ago, is the most refreshing comic material Hollywood has encountered in a long time. The resulting cinema, though overlong and talky, is a delightful comedy charged with impish innuendo and raw laughter.
Playwright Thurber’s hopelessly human hero is a blurting young English professor (Henry Fonda) who gets branded a Red because he wants to read one of Vanzetti’s (of Massachusetts’ Sacco & Vanzetti) letters to his class. The battle is joined when one of his wife’s (Olivia de Havilland) old football-playing beaux, Joe the Twirler (Jack Carson), arrives at Midwestern U. for the big game.
The professor watches his rival, who comes “from a long line of married people,” warming over old times with his wife, and jealously observes that a woman should not go on living with a man when she dances better with another man. This philosophical approach trips and stumbles into paganism when he takes to liquor while his wife and Joe go off to the game together. In a hilarious drunk scene he resolves to hold his mate as a tiger does—by fighting for her. He does hold her—not with tigerish might, but by reading the trustee-forbidden Vanzetti letter to his composition class and becoming the college hero.
This well-pastried pie of sense and nonsense is ably dished out by Protagonists Fonda and de Havilland. Co-Author Nugent, who directed, fails to reduce it from play form to unadulterated cinema, but is faithful to the captivating Thurber theme. Noisy Actor Carson is a natural for his Piltdown role. His best scene: demonstrating—in the professor’s living room, with the professor’s best china—his sensational new football play: a fake fake.
We Were Dancing (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) apparently happened while everyone at M.G.M. was looking the other way. It is distantly based on some of the nine sketches in Playwright Noel Coward’s Tonight at 8:30. Sample lines:
“Love. . . . It’s rivers flowing uphill.”
“Most marriages are prose; ours will be poetry.”
“I was the fool of modern millionaires. . . . But she came into my life and filled it with laughter.”
This Cowardly travesty is prittle-prattled by Princess Vicki Wilomirska (Norma Shearer), a penniless Polish refugee, and Baron Nicki Prax (Melvyn Douglas), a penniless Viennese. He aptly describes himself as “a tramp in a white tie”—a professional weekend guest; she is a well-set-up young woman looking for a U.S. millionaire. So they fall in love, marry, live off his rich socialite acquaintances, divorce, remarry after he has become an interior decorator.
Tailor-made for Miss Shearer, who has been off the screen for a year, Dancing is a costly, embarrassing picture, whose mood and manners are both dated and false.
The Lady Has Plans (Paramount) was apparently conceived as an excuse for undressing Paulette Goddard. It requires her (a radio leg-woman) to be mistaken for a pretty spy who has a U.S. military secret inscribed on her back in invisible ink.
This titillating situation subjects lissome Paulette to considerable pushing and hauling and anatomical investigation, permits her to display her most absentee gowns. The situation gets almost absentee itself after the Gestapo, Scotland Yard, and America’s G-men have had her in & out of dungeons and the assorted paraphernalia that go with melodramatic spy pictures.
Luckily for the plot, the real spy never has time to take a bath.
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