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The Notorious Gentleman (J. Arthur Rank-Universal) is a British-made comedy which English moviegoers chuckled over last year when it was called The Rake's Progress. U.S. distributors have changed the title, on the theory that Americans might mistake the picture for a documentary on gardening (TIME, Aug. 5). U.S. censors demanded further appeasement. (Example: as an undergraduate cutup, the rake, or notorious gentleman, one day climbs an Oxford monument to deposit a chamber pot on the spire.* The Johnston Office, either on the grounds that a thundermug was an affront to American plumberhood or that it was just plain vulgar, substituted a silk hat.)
By whatever name it's labeled, the picture is pretty funny. The rake (Rex Harrison) is an amiable, Noel Cowardish sort of cad whose inability to take anything very seriously causes no end of trouble to himself, his employers, his family, his chums and his ladyfriends. As played by Actor Harrison and manipulated by writers-directors-producers Frank Launder and Sydney Gilliat (one of Mr. Rank's brighter young production teams), the rake's fast, downhill progress is topnotch fun with a pleasant British accent. The fun holds up, and so does the picture, until all the actors suddenly wipe the smiles off their faces at the end and admit that carefree living doesn't really pay.
Universal, shrewdly delaying the picture's release, can now profit by Rex Harrison's first Hollywood job (Anna and the King of Siam), a solid box-office hit.
Lady Luck (RKO Radio) is a tired, old-fashioned farce struggling with desperate unsuccess to palm itself off as fresh comedy-romance.
Like all the women in her family, the heroine (Barbara Hale) has had long and bitter experience with gambling men. She wants to make an honest living by running a bookstore, but her hard-earned nickels & dimes are frittered away by Grandpa (Frank Morgan), a lovable old scoundrel who cannot resist a pony or a poker game. When Barbara falls in love, her young man, of course, turns out to be another confirmed gambler (Robert Young).
Except for a few realistic, mildly funny bookmaking and gaming-table scenes, all events leading up to the final clinch are trite and tortured. Gamblers will note with satisfaction that the scriptwriters did not give the betting habit too rough a beating. The movie's only discoverable moral: never bet against love.
*With being "sent down" as the possible penalty, the hero's prank is performed in broad daylight before an admiring student crowd. In reality, when playful Oxonians have felt an urge to embellish the Martyrs' Memorial, the chamber pot has been applied in darkness, in stealth and with cement.