Cinema: The New Pictures: Aug. 5, 1940

The Boys From Syracuse (Universal] is prime Rodgers & Hart champagne Broadway 1938, rebottled. One more reworking of the George Abbott reworking of William Shakespeare’s reworking of Plautus’ reworking of the old mistaken-identity story of a double set of twins, the plot is the flattest part of the show. As bubbly as ever are the songs This Can’t Be Love, Sing for your Supper, Falling in Love With Love, He and She, fortified by two new Rodgers & Hart numbers, Who Are You and The Greeks Have No Word For It.

Though the resources of the camera permit Joe Penner to double as both Dromios, and Allan Jones to do the same for Antipholus, no other economy is discernible in a handsome, glittering cine-musical production. Items: the singing of Jones and Rosemary Lane, the shouting of Martha Raye, the diffidence of Charles Butterworth as the Duke of Ephesus, the expostulations of Alan Mowbray and Eric Blore as a couple of tax-ridden tailors.

They Drive By Night (Warner) is about “road slobs,” those minuscule but stubborn capitalists who wheel their installment-plan trucks along the highways of the U. S. in fair weather and foul, keep awake by playing pinball in roadside eateries, fear slippery curves and the finance company, and could not name a single member of the Interstate Commerce Com mission. Joe Fabrini (George Raft) is as uninhibited a slob as ever slapped a pretty waitress on the rump. He likes Cassie Bartley (Ann Sheridan), a waitress who won’t let him. He likes his truck, his brother Paul (Humphrey Bogart), and when he dreams, it is of being a big trucker like his genial, loudmouthed friend Ed Carlsen (Alan Hale). It is not Joe’s fault that Carlsen has a strumpety little