Cinema, Also Showing Oct. 9, 1944

The Impatient Years (Columbia) converts a promising situation—the readjustment problems of a returning soldier and his wife—into fair-to-middling, coarsegrained comedy (typical shot: the shy pair, on their first night of reunion, prowling round & round the nuptial bed like two suspicious alley cats). Halfway through, the story goes fancy, loses touch with its touching subject but not entirely with its ability to get laughs, thanks to Jean Arthur, Charles Coburn, Lee Bowman, Charley Grapewin.

Bride by Mistake (RKO-Radio) had every right to be a perfectly awful mistake, but turns out to be pretty amusing. Its raw material is one of those five-&-dime stories about the sensitive multimillion-heiress (Laraine Day) who, eager to be sure that her lover (Alan Marshal) is not overvaluing the basely fiscal aspects of their relationship, swaps places with her secretary (Marsha Hunt) and all but bangs the pair’s heads together. The surprising finished product is the result of the fact that the film is written by Phoebe and Henry Ephron, directed by Richard Wallace and played by the Misses Day and Hunt, Mr. Marshal, Allan Joslyn, and able supporters Edgar Buchanan and Slim Summerville, as if this sort of thing might conceivably happen to real, and rather likable, people. Biggest surprise: Miss Day’s charming, sexy flair for light comedy.

Music in Manhattan (RKO-Radio) offers mild pleasure despite the barrenness of its musicomic clichés. Some of them: Ace Philip Terry finds aspiring Actress Anne Shirley asleep in his hotel bed; housing-shortage forces them to pretend they are married; Miss Shirley soars to success as a Broadway musicomedienne, whisks through five production numbers, decides she loves her ersatz husband for keeps.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Battle for the Marianas (U.S. Marine Corps; TIME, Oct. 2).

Casanova Brown (Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, Frank Morgan, Patricia Collinge; TIME, Sept. 18).

Arsenic and Old Lace (Cary Grant, Priscilla Lane; TIME, Sept. 11).

Hail the Conquering Hero (Eddie Bracken, Ella Raines, William Demarest; TIME, Aug. 21).

Wilson (Alexander Knox, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Coburn; TIME, Aug. 7).