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Worth every cent it cost, Mad About Music is Deanna's (and the new Universal's) best picture to date. In the charming setting of a small Swiss village, Deanna lives out a gay-and-pathetic story. Her father is dead, her mother a Hollywood glamor girl (Gail Patrick) who can't afford to admit she has a 14-year-old daughter. Deanna keeps her mother's secret, but to match tales with her schoolmates, conjures up a debonair, daring, doting father. When, as it does to all fabricators, the day comes when she must substantiate her stories, mellow, understanding Actor Herbert Marshall steps off the train, finds himself doing and saying things he never dreamed of.
What makes Mad About Music such heart-warming entertainment is that, in addition to a good cast and first-rate acting, it has a story into which Deanna's singing fits naturally and well. Director Norman Taurog, famed for his handling of child players (Skippy, Sooky, Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of Tom Sawyer). makes the tale tick along like a fine watch, keeps his schoolgirls under better control than any schoolmarm could. Advancing the plot with every liquid note, Deanna sings Gounod's Ave Maria and three compositions by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson. Best of them: I Love To Whistle.
Good bit: Valet Arthur Treacher before a mirror, rehearsing a dressing down for Master Marshall, and getting caught at it.
Bringing Up Baby (RKO-Radio). When she was a college girl ten years ago, redheaded, Melpomene-mouthed Katharine Hepburn, in a trailing white nightgown crosshatched with gold ribbon, regaled Bryn Mawr as Pandora in The Woman in the Moon. And since then most of Actress Hepburn's public appearances have been for the catch-in-the-throat cinema, playing alternately great ladies and emotional starvelings of brittle bravado. For Bringing Up Baby she plumps her broad A in the midst of a frantically farcical plot involving Actor Gary Grant, a terrier, a leopard, a Brontosaurus skeleton and a crotchety collection of Connecticut quidnuncs, proves she can be as amusingly skittery a comedienne as the best of them.
Actor Grant is an earnest, bespectacled paleontologist who is more interested in an intercostal clavicle for his nearly reconstructed Brontosaurus than he is in bony, scatterbrained Miss Hepburn. Miss Hepburn has a pet leopard named Baby, and an aunt (May Robson) with $1,000,000 waiting for the right museum. On the trail of the million, Actor Grant crosses paths with Actress Hepburn and Baby, loses the scent in the tangled Connecticut wildwood. In the jail of a town very like arty Westport, the trails collide. Most surprising scene: Actress Hepburn, dropping her broad A for a nasal Broadway accent, knocking Town Constable Walter Catlett and Jailmate Grant completely off balance with: "Hey, flatfoot! I'm gonna unbutton my puss and shoot the woiks. An' I wouldn' be squealin' if he hadn' a give me the runaround for another twist."