Cinema, Also Showing Sep. 28, 1942

One of Our Aircraft Is Missing (United Artists) begins with a superb reel that shows a British bomber taking off, crossing the North Sea, bombing Germany, then starting back partly wrecked. At last its crew of six men bail out over Holland. This much of the picture cannot improve on Target for Tonight (TIME, Nov. 3, 1941), which was an unpretentious classic on the same subject, but it makes too good a show to miss. The next hour is a bearable letdown.

When the airmen land in Holland, the film becomes a familiar kind of British melodrama. Their escape to England is facilitated principally by two young women (Pamela Browne and Googie Withers) who sometimes look rather like Dutch paintings, sometimes more like avenging angels. Pamela Browne, star of the Oxford Repertory Company, can really act. Googie Withers doesn’t need to; even in a false beard she could steal scenes from the average Hollywood nymph. The gentlemen of the crew are English actors; they know their job and do it with adequate grace and tact.

Orchestra Wives (20th Century-Fox). Glenn Miller’s bandsmen tie up their talents in neatly packaged tunes, while their handsome, catty wives all but wreck Ann Rutherford’s tremulous marriage to star Trumpeter Bill Abbott (George Montgomery). Miss Rutherford, with two of Hollywood’s gentlest shoulders and most innocent eyes, is, by fits & starts, a sensitive actress. Trumpeter Montgomery acts as if the man who blows the trumpet for him had threatened to give away the deception at any moment. Glenn Miller acts like Glenn Miller, without too much discredit to Glenn Miller. One of his numbers, the slack-hipped, chromatic Serenade in Blue, may well become a juke-box jackpot.