The New Pictures, Sep. 11, 1950

Tea for Two (Warner), based vaguely on the immensely successful 1924 musical No, No, Nanette, sheds a Technicolor tear for the good old days of plus fours, prohibition and the stock-market crash. The story, about a Broadway show, employs nearly every musical-comedy cliche —from romantic misunderstandings between Doris Day and radio’s Gordon MacRae to pratfalls by Comic Billy De Wolfe. Every quarter-hour or so there is a big production number.

As hot-weather entertainment, Tea for Two is at its best when concentrating on the old tunes of Vincent Youmans, George Gershwin and Roger Wolfe Kahn.*

The Black Rose (20th Century-Fox] shows how Tyrone Power brought the magnetic compass, the art of papermaking and the secret of gunpowder from far-off Cathay to 13th Century England. Based on Thomas B. Costain’s lush historical novel, the film bristles with research, Technicolor, 5,600 extras (not counting 500 horses and 1,000 camels), the English countryside and sun-scorched vistas of Asian deserts. On this broad canvas, however, Scripter Talbot Jennings traces a curiously skimpy design.

Director Henry (Lives of a Bengal Lancer) Hathaway is never able to overcome that handicap. Whenever the movie’s fitful action promises to become as spectacular as its settings, his camera seems to be looking in the wrong direction. The ferocity of Mongol hordes, commanded by a leering Orson Welles, is neatly foreshadowed in scenes of a barbaric tournament. But when they pillage and burn Chinese cities, the picture has nothing to show for it but some lines of post-mortem dialogue and a pillar of fiery smoke on the far horizon. An oily merchant announces that he is sending a caravan to Kublai Khan with rich gifts, including 81 beautiful women; Director Hathaway shows plenty of caravan, but he never brings on the dancing girls.

Instead, The Black Rose devotes much of its footage to an unlikely romance between Power, as the self-exiled bastard son of a Norman earl, and a prattling slave girl—played by plump-cheeked young (20) French Starlet Cecile Aubry as if she were a fugitive from Little Women. Power’s odyssey through Asia with a stuffy fellow exile (British Actor Jack Hawkins) is sandwiched between long, talky sequences picturing Norman-Saxon strife in England. And from time to time the film wanders off on little verbal jags to point up its sentimental moral: that it’s a jolly fine thing to be an Englishman.

Some competent British players give ballast to the supporting cast, and Actor Welles proves surprisingly convincing as the tough Mongol general. Yet, with all the equipment for a spectacle, the film is likely to leave moviegoers feeling cheated —and nursing a healthy new respect for Cecil B. DeMille.

Summer Stock (M-G-M), no great shakes as a cinemusical, serves nonetheless as a welcome reminder of Judy Garland’s unerring way with a song. Ill, and in & out of trouble with her studio, Actress Garland has been off the screen since last year’s In the Good Old Summertime. A rest cure left her chubbily overweight for her first return performance. But none of it seems to have affected her ability as one of Hollywood’s few triple-threat girls. Thanks to Actress Garland’s singing, dancing and acting (and some imaginative dancing by Gene Kelly), the picture seems considerably better than it is: a backstage musical daubed in Technicolor and damned by a predictable show-must-go-on plot.

For awhile the musical is less pretentious than most, and lets Judy break into song without the usual awkwardly concocted cues or backstage trimmings. Kelly and a troupe of theatrical young hopefuls invade Judy’s farm to try out their show in her barn. Her stage-struck sister (Gloria De Haven), the leading lady, persuades her not to throw them out. By the time temperamental Gloria flounces out of rehearsals, Judy has found Kelly and show business intriguing enough to take over the role herself—and M-G-M begins loading the barn stage with production numbers that would tax a Broadway theater.

For comedy, the movie brings on Eddie Bracken as Judy’s straitlaced rural suitor, and Phil Silvers, who is funny up to a point that he soon leaves behind. Dancer Kelly shines in a number that makes ingenious rhythmic use of two props: a creaking floorboard and a rustling sheet of newspaper. But it is Actress Garland who is most responsible for giving Summer Stock the bounce and vitality that keep it going. Though the show’s only distinguished song is an old one, Get Happy, her voice and showmanlike delivery do wonders for the whole score.

*Saxophone-playing son of the late Financier Otto (Metropolitan Opera) Kahn. Roger broke up his dance band in the late ’30s, became a fighter-plane test pilot, is now manager of the service department for Grumman.