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Geordie threw, and Geordie won by such an impressive margin that he was haled away to Australia with the British Olympic team, but there at last he met his match: a 6-ft. lady shotputter named Helga. What happens next is probably the meatiest love affair known to show business since Barnum publicized Jumbo and Alice, and it is certainly one of the funniest in years. The moviegoer should have a thoroughly silly good time just sitting and watching two people make beautiful muscles together.
The Best Things in Life Are Free (20th Century-Fox). The trouble with most movies that tell the success story of a famous figure in show business is that they are all success and no story: the producers all too often eliminate the key facts of the fellow's life at the insistence of lawyers and relatives, or even in the interests of good taste. To correct this defect, Author John (Ten North Frederick) O'Hara has developed an idea that may in future save the public ear from being so painfully chewed by Hollywood's more persistent ego beavers. He has written a "biopic" without a bio. The heroes of this latest vanity film are Lew Brown, Ray Henderson and the late Buddy de Sylva, the well-known Tin Pan Alley team of the '203. But the story is the story of three other guys: O'Hara just made it up. Furthermore, he made it (with the help of William Bowers and Phoebe Ephron) into pretty much the sort of simpleminded, dimple-kneed doohickey a musicomedy book should be.
According to the film, De Sylva, Brown and Henderson (Gordon MacRae, Ernest Borgnine and Dan Dailey) were Broadway characters as salty as the waiters in Lindy's, and for most of the distance they give the customer a pretty fair run for his money. MacRae lays his wad on fast women, Borgnine on slow horses, and Dailey gives his paycheck to the ever-loving wife. But they all get together to write pretty little ditties (Sonny Boy, Black Bottom, Button Up Your Overcoat, Birth of the Blues), and Sheree North is usually around to sing them. The show glides along, smooth as a Detroit Air Cooled ("buoyant readability")-a dependable vehicle for those who long to be carried back to the days when the girls did the flea hop in short skirts, and the demand for violin cases was curiously in excess of the demand for violins.
*A credit now being contested in court by Scriptwriter James Poe.