And the Angels Sing (Paramount) tries for wacky comedy like a fat man trying to get over the 220 low hurdles.
The Angels are four sisters of that name in Glenby Falls, N.Y. They want to help their widowed father buy a farm where he can indulge his passion for raising soybeans. Nancy Angel (Dorothy Lamour) wants to be an artist, Bobby (Betty Hutton) an ace reporter, Patti (Mimi Chandler) a Shakespearean actress, Josie (Diana Lynn) a composer. Between daydreams and quarrels they pick up spare cash by staging musical acts at a local roadhouse. There they run afoul of a transient bandleader, Happy Marshall (Fred MacMurray), who promptly advises Cinemactress Lamour: "Let's not fight this thing, it's bigger than both of us." She is not impressed, but innocent Cinemactress Hutton is.
Happy gyps her out of her winnings at the crap table, hurries on with his insolvent boys to Schultz's Copacabana, in Brooklyn. The vengeful sisters and their father follow. From there on Happy's two-timing gets more & more complicated and less & less funny. Too much of this dizzy story shows signs of hard labor; about half is rather enjoyable. Betty Hutton (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) gets funnier with every picture. She is the most startling expression of natural force since the Johnstown Flood.
Up in Mabel's Room (United Artists) is such a strong smell of camphor that only the most insensitive cinemoths can survive it. On the notion that a terrible wheeze, properly delivered, can be even funnier than a good one, the revival of this stone-age (1919) stage farce might have turned out very well. But all the players handle its dim demi-wit as if it were Oscar Wilde epigrams.
Out of the story, too (a man trying frantically to keep evidence of a former affair out of the hands of his suspicious bride), a fairly amusing picture might have come. But this production runs like a remaindered edition of The 10,000 Worst Mother-in-Law Jokes.
Sample wowser:
Wife (explaining her husband's absence): "But it's business."
Mother-in-law: "You mean monkey-business."
Shouting such paralyzers at each other, and dodging in & out of each other's embraces, recriminations, trousers, lingerie and bedroom doors like so many harassed trout are Cinemactors Dennis O'Keefe, Lee Bowman, John Hubbard, Mischa Auer, Cinemactresses Marjorie Reynolds, Gail Patrick, Binnie Barnes. For those who are curious to see what rolled the U.S. in the aisles only 25 years ago, the show is a museum treat.
The Irish Question (MARCH OF TIME) manages with particular clarity and detached sympathy to explain 1) Eire's neutrality, 2) her intense resentment at the recent U.S. demand that she expel German and Japanese consuls and envoys. Chief explanation: Eire is very old in oppression and bitterness, very young in political independence. Her nervy neutrality is a declaration of that independence which no amount of sympathy with the
Allied cause can shake. A still more penetrating suggestion: if you want to under stand an Irishman, or the Irish, examine his passion, not his reason.