The Solid Gold Cadillac (Columbia), on the perilous trip from Broadway to Hollywood, made a major change of drivers, but moviegoers will be pleased to discover that it did not run out of gas. Judy Holliday is sitting at the wheel instead of Josephine Hull, and though she can scarcely hope to achieve in the part what one critic called "the ineffable waddle of Mrs. Hull's Schraffterpiece," Actress Holliday demonstrates again that, pound for pound, she is one of the best comediennes in the business. Add to that the fact that she is paired—for the first time since 1946, when both of them made the big time in Broadway's Born Yesterday—with Paul Douglas, who sometimes even steals a march on Judy herself with his uncanny ability to lose the laugh but win the scene.
In the screenplay by Abe Burrows, breezily adapted from the original farce by Howard Teichmann and George S. Kaufman, Actor Douglas plays a lion of industry. Actress Holliday the thorn in his paw—an unemployed actress who has ten shares of stock in his corporation and nothing better to do than come to stockholders' meetings and ask awkward questions ("What does a chairman of the board do?"). Pretty soon she begins to make downright distressing suggestions ("I move that the salaries are too big''). Before long, the self-appointed stockholders' watchdog has nipped so many corporate ankles that the alarmed directors decide they had better throw her a bone. They offer her a job as "Director of Stockholder Relations."
Judy is delighted. "What do I do?" she asks. Says the president: "Oh—er—uh.v Judy takes that to mean she can do just about anything that comes into her busy little mind, all the way from writing cozy letters to stockholders in Texas ("That's a big state. People there must be very lonely'') to blackmailing the board of directors. Conclusion: Judy wins control of the whole shebang in a proxy fight, marries the chairman of the board and has herself elected executive vice president, secretary and treasurer. Moral: businessmen who want to stay in business had better learn the difference between stocks and blondes.
The Ten Commandments (Paramount], the 70th motion picture produced by 75-year-old Cecil B. DeMille. is the biggest, the most expensive, and in some respects perhaps the most vulgar movie ever made. In it DeMille has told the story of the Book of Exodus at a length of three hours and 39 minutes, and at a cost of $13.5 million. To break even, Producer DeMille may have to gross as much as $25 million. But shrewd old "Mr. Movies," the man who in 40 years has lured more than 3½ billion customers past the wicket, is calmly confident that he will do a great deal better than that; that he will, in fact, do something in the neighborhood of $100 million.