Cinema: Musicals

Exactly 39% of all Hollywood pictures-in-production, twice as many as a year ago, are musical comedies. Obvious object: an anodyne for U.S. war pains. Hollywood’s anodynes for its own music-making pains:

> To conserve silk tights, chorus rehearsals have been cut in half.

> To get around a Government-imposed $5,000 ceiling on new outlays for stage sets, rival studios have pooled scenery, gone in for second-hand wonderlands.

>There is a shortage of chorus boys. Most studios consequently use fewer and older men.

> Negroes are getting a break: Hollywood will put out two all-Negro pictures in a single season (M.G.M.’s Cabin in the Sky, 20th Century-Fox’s Stormy Weather).

Most of the nation’s name bands and singers are signed to movie contracts; many of the nation’s hit songs are coming from Hollywood; and Technicolor has overcome a fundamental problem that black & white photography posed; in Technicolor there is no loss of leg-art allure.

Released this week were two alluring Technicolor musicals:

Happy Go Lucky (Paramount) is a calypso excursion to Trinidad which lost its Hays office censors en route. The picture’s mildly daffy happenings, concern Mary (My Heart Belongs to Daddy) Martin’s campaign to capture a rich husband (Rudy Vallee). For Rudy, it is the second time around the course (first: as John D. Hackensacker III in Palm Beach Story—TIME, Jan. 4). He seems a little off his game. For Miss Martin, the story is merely a roundabout means of arriving at the discovery that her heart belongs to Dick Powell.

Background for all this is a lush setting which may be one of the last glimpses of old-style Hollywood opulence that cinema audiences will have for the duration. Happy Go Lucky also has love potions, sultry calypso songs and dances by a group of Trinidadians headed by “Sir Launcelot” Pinard, some first-rate Frank Loesser and

Jimmy McHugh songs, a ribald number (Fuddy-Duddy Watchmaker) by Betty Hutton, some neat hip-swinging by Miss Martin and some homespunish philosophy by Comic Eddie Bracken (sample: “You only get out of a sweater what you put into it.”)

Hello, Frisco, Hello* (20th Century-Fox) is approximately 100% Alice Faye. This is her first picture since she took time out two years ago to have a baby. Slimmer (112 Ib.), more sedate and embellished with a new hairdo by famed Coiffeur Wayne Forrest, Alice winsomely croons many an old sweet song.

Picturing a bowdlerized version of lusty old San Francisco in the 1900s, Miss Faye & Co. tour Pacific Street’s colorful saloons, stage a novel roller-skating dance, hop to Europe for a magnificent shot of a Dutch tulip field, and by way of plot attempt to prove that never the Barbary Coast (John Payne) and Nob Hill (Lynn Bari) shall meet. Technicolor does justice to Miss Bari’s talents.

*For its San Francisco premiere called Hello, San Francisco, Hello because San Franciscans wince at the contraction (TIME, March 15).