Rose Marie (MGM) is a title that Hollywood has used to cover a multitude of scenarios. In the Harbach-Hammer-stein hit musical on Broadway (1924), Rose Marie was a cute little French Canadian named La Flamme, in love with a brave young trapper. To save her lover's life, La Flamme was forced to accept the attentions of a villain named Edward Hawley. In 1928 M-G-M first presented Rose Marie as a sort of silent musical, and gave Joan Crawford, in the leading role, a dying husband to nurse between gripping scenes with both the trapper and a Canadian Mountie.
The producers of the 1936 version, perhaps feeling that Jeanette MacDonald was not exactly the rustic type, converted Rose Marie La Flamme, the woodsy little songbird, into Marie de Flor, a grand-opera star. The romantic trapper became her runaway brother, and the Mountie moved into the No. 1 spot so that Nelson Eddy could wear a flashy uniform and get the girl as well as his man in the last chorus of the title song.
In the current Rose Marie, Producer-Director Mervyn Le Roy (Million Dollar Mermaid) has managed to combine almost all the worst features of the preceding productions with a few especially thought up for the occasion. Rose Marie, having simmered down from La Flamme to just plain Lemaitre, is played by Ann Blyth in the manner of a fashion model to whom all that gorgeous scenery is just a backdrop for her Paris buckskins. As the French Canadian trapper, Argentine Fernando Lamas has some accent trouble that makes him seem about as much at home in the picture as a Gaucho on the Yukon trail.
MGM's publicity department says that both Ann and Lamas do their own singing (Indian Love Call) in Rose Marie —a statement that is closer to an admission than a boast. Howard Keel, however, is in fine voice as the Mountie singing Rose Marie. Keel is assisted by the fact that at times, thanks to Eastman Color and his crimson coat, he is easier to find than the other principals in the vast reaches of the CinemaScope screen.
Intimate Relations (Carroll Pictures). The horror of the octopus, wrote Victor Hugo, is not that it eats its victims, but that it drinks them alive. Anyone interested in experiencing this sensation without suffering the consequences can do so for the price of admission to this English translation of Jean Cocteau's long-running play, Les Parents Terribles. (A French film version of the drama, made in 1948, ran for only a few performances in the U.S. in 1950.)
The monster of the piece is a possessive mother (Marian Spencer). One day her son struggles free of her sure-enwinding arms just long enough to state that he is in love. The mother clutches him closer and spits a blackcloud of slander at her rival. The father (Harold Warrender), when he discovers that the son's fiancee (Elsy Albiin) is his own mistress, agrees with mother, "for the sake of the boy.!: The children are put to a hideous emotional ordeal only to have the parents realize when it is all over that older heads are not necessarily wiser. Yet no sooner are the lovers reunited than the mother, crazed with self-pity, takes poison in order to get the attention she cannot live without.