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To meet their deadline, the smart alecks from Manhattan have to photograph a winter wedding to look like a June ceremony. To meet the magazine's flossy standards, they must "do over" the bride's folksy family and a dowdy house crammed full of Victorian gewgaws ("a real McKinley stinker"). To get a little interest into the story, Writer Montgomery even does some tampering with the matter of who is to marry whom.
The picture is fairly funny as soon as the city slickers are turned loose on the Indiana household to beat it into a slick-paper image of American home life. But before it gets down to the pertinent business of massaging weight off a middle-aged housewife or teaching her to bake a cheese souffle, June Bride dawdles a little too long and too archly over the pallid romance between Career Girl Davis and Anti-Feminist Montgomery. Even so, this familiar situation is freshened by sharp lines and the skilled ease with which Montgomery tosses them off.
Road House (20th Century-Fox) is an unlikely tale about a village tough guy (Richard Widmark) who hires a luscious crooner (Ida Lupino) for his roadside joint. He makes a few unsuccessful passes at her, and then goes on a hunting trip, leaving his entertainer to be entertained by his house manager (Cornel Wilde). When his hirelings fall in love, Widmark goes into a mad scene. The scene can only be explained by the fact the scripters knew that Actor Widmark's specialty is playing a demented killer.
All in all, the picture whips up a lot of unmotivated excitement. But Director Jean Negulesco has masked a thin yarn in some deceptive trappings of reality. He swings his camera over short, sharp chunks of dialogue, searches with his lens in the drab corners of the road house, and builds to a climax in a fine movie chase. Lacking lifelike characters, he gives things a gloss of credibility by keeping his camera on the move. Before the audience can quite catch on to his sleight of hand, the scene has shifted.
Widmark's frenzy, as usual, is well played. Ida Lupino is an attractive crooner, and she is also given the season's most novel excuse for shooting a villain: he tried to throw a rock at her.
* His Gabriel over the White House, Washington Merry-Go-Round, and The President Vanishes were considered politically daring when they were made; Blockade and Foreign Correspondent were dynamite before the U.S. entered World War II; Private Worlds was one of the first psychiatric movies; Trail of the Lonesome Pine was the first movie with outdoor color photography.