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A small, plain, ash-blonde girl, Betty resembles anything but a movie siren. But she makes the most of her looks, has developed a technique well-suited to the camera. Her eyes are her principal dramatic weapon, and she can make a raised or lowered eyelid as articulate as a sweeping gesture. She rarely cracks her poker face, and this frozen countenance subtracts several years from her appearance. It also makes her look as if she were hiding some painful mental torture. Said one friend: "Until you get to know her, you think she's mad at you."
Chad Hanna (20th Century-Fox). Chad is a stable boy in upper New York circa 1840. When Huguenine's One & Only International Circus comes to town, Chad joins it as roustabout. He takes a fancy to Albany Yates (Dorothy Lamour), the high rider, but marries Albany's understudy (Linda Darnell). He slugs it out in a free-for-all brawl with a rival circus, takes over the ringmaster's duties when Owner Huguenine falls ill, quarrels with his wife, leaves her, soon returns in contrition. That is about all.
When Chad Hanna appeared in the Saturday Evening Post as Red Wheels Rolling it had the attraction of Walter D. Edmonds's popular writing. Producer Nunnally Johnson's screen treatment glosses over the banality of the plot, becomes a simple, artful study of an ordinary, unimportant man. For Chad it has. lanky, loose-jointed Henry Fonda, one of the screen's few leading men able to say "ain't" without wincing. Grey, grumpy Director Henry King, who usually handles Fox's spectacles, resisted the temptation to let his camera linger on the Techni-colored accoutrements of the oldtime circus scene, formed his screenplay into a memorable portrait of a man.
Good shot: Fonda and Darnell shyly eying each other at the wedding dinner while the tippling guests urge them to kiss.
Comrade X (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) takes care of the movies' left-over jokes on Communism and the electricity generated by the combined presence of Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr. Gable, as the footloose correspondent of a U. S. paper, finds himself involved in the political intrigue of the U. S. S. R. That also includes Miss Lamarr who strolls placidly through the role of a Soviet streetcar motorman intent on the cause. Scripters Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer's picture of bungling and dawdling inside the Soviet is a lot less witty, and less tender than Greta Garbo's memorable film Ninotchka. But their slapstick commentary is a relief from the realities of headlines.
CURRENT & CHOICE The Bank Dick (W. C. Fields; TIME, Dec. 30).
Santa Fe Trail (Raymond Massey, Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland; TIME, Dec. 23).
Go West (Marx Brothers; TIME, Dec. 23).
The Letter (Bette Davis, Herbert Marshall, James Stephenson; TIME, Dec. 2).