The New Pictures, Oct. 4, 1948

The Luck of the Irish (20th Century-Fox) burdens a pleasant little comedy with a forbiddingly sticky title. The movie is just about as sham as most shamrock tales, but, with one exception, it is presented with taste and ingenuity. The exception: sequences taking place in Ireland are smeared with a green tint that displays the world as through a shower curtain.

Like the same studio’s Miracle on 34th Street, the new picture is a fantasy in which a pixie (well played by Cecil Kellaway) takes sides in a conflict between two oversimplified sets of values. The conflict involves Newsman Tyrone Power, who must choose between Good (writing as he pleases for “nickels and dimes” and marrying lovely Anne Baxter) and Evil (selling out to New York Publishing Tycoon Lee J. Cobb and his predatory daughter, Jayne Meadows). Any leprechaun knows the difference between good & evil, but it takes some time for a stuffy hero to figure it out.

This picture, like Miracle, creates conviction by a deadpan treatment of fantasy — and works its miracles with a minimum of photographic hocuspocus.

Larceny (Universal-International) is as slick as the two con men (John Payne and Dan Duryea) who set out to fleece a pretty, not very bright war widow (Joan Caulfield). Their plot is to persuade the lady to finance a youth center as a war memorial to her hero-husband—or rather, as a paid-up charity benefit for themselves. Their dastardly scheme is clicking along like the southbound express when it develops a hotbox. Payne is far too successful as a lady-killer. He has a hard time convincing the widow that he is not part of the memorial package he is trying to sell, and he cannot escape the relentless pursuit of a gun moll named Tory (Shelley Winters).

Neither of the girls gets him, and Miss Winters gets nothing, finally, but a lead slug in her midriff. But not before her shrewd playing has made Tory a wench to be remembered. Larceny ends on a sad note, because sharp direction and dialogue have made its crooks into likable lads who seem to be getting a raw deal. This medium-budget picture’s brisk, realistic details may make its manufacturers a tidy profit.

In the past year Shelley Winters, 26, has made solid hits in two successive pictures. The other was A Double Life, in which she played the waitress who got strangled. She is no longer regarded as just another cute platinum blonde: she has graduated into the actress category. Her bosses speak hopefully of “an amalgam of Harlow and Lombard,” and are billing her as “the blonde bombshell.” If she is not as bold as Harlow nor as brittle as Lombard, she is frequently as bouncy as Betty Hutton and as breezy as Grable. Even in repose, she is still a nifty blonde (5 ft. 4 in.) with bright, blue eyes.

Her parts in two unreleased films are also villainous. In her career of screen wickedness, she has already been strangled, shot, run over by a car and sentenced to prison (as a bad girl must be).

Shelley was born in East St. Louis, Ill., went through Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn, modeled in Manhattan’s garment district, had a fling at musi-comedy and horse operas. In Larceny, she worked with a young director (George Sherman) and two writers fresh from radio (Herbert Margolis and Louis Morheim) who let her try Tory her own way. She gave it a strong blend of sex, humor, loneliness and desperation. A fair percentage of males in any audience might be scared of Tory, but few would run away.

An Innocent Affair (United Artists) is one of those involved marital farces that would not last five minutes if all the principals stopped rushing around just long enough to use their heads. A young advertising executive (Fred MacMurray) is having wife trouble because he spends too many nights on the ad account of a “Mr. Fraser,” who happens to be Mrs. Fraser (Louise Allbritton) and an old flame at that. This not improbable situation gets out of hand when the wife (Madeleine Carroll) plans to test her spouse’s jealousy. She hires an actor to flirt with her at a nightclub; the actor’s agent tips off the husband in advance; an unsuspecting tobacco tycoon (Charles “Buddy” Rogers) sits at the wrong table; and so on.

MacMurray, who has a fair gift for comedy, is wasted on this buffoonery, and the harsh camera work on Madeleine Carroll almost smacks of persecution.