The New Pictures, Jul. 28, 1941

Tom, Dick and Harry (RKO Radio) is homespun Ginger Rogers’ first picture since her Oscarization. That Hollywood halo has not noticeably affected good old Ginger. She is still the epitome of the U.S. working girl—nonchalant, wise-eyed, self-sufficient, heaven-protected. Her performance as Janie The Beautiful Phone Girl, whose moonstruck propensity for accepting honorable proposals lands her in three simultaneous engagements, is adroitly comic.

Tom (George Murphy) is a serious young automobile salesman with a talent for getting barely perceptible promotions and a tendency to hiss Hitler at the movies. When he threatens to commit suicide if his proposal is rejected, she is really interested, asks breathlessly: “How?” Later, unraveling her fiancé with a phone-girl friend, she concludes: “I think maybe he gets promoted too much.”

Dick (Alan Marshall) is what Janie has been waiting for: tall, dark, handsome and a millionaire. This time she needs no urging. Dreaming of their forthcoming marriage, she visions it crowding Adolf Hitler off the front pages. Gloats her playboy fiancé: “And to think I might have married [Glamor Girl] Brenda Whitney Jr., Columbus 5-0098.”

Harry (Burgess Meredith) is well cast as a mistake. A garage mechanic, alone in Dick’s classy convertible, he is picked up by Janie, who recognizes the car and thinks Harry is Dick, whom she has not met but hopes to. She impulsively climbs in beside him. That night they go dancing —in a booth in a phonograph record shop. But Janie cannot resist the bushy-haired mechanic’s impregnably impertinent charm. He: “I think maybe I’m in love with you.” She: “You are?” He: “I think so.” A pause and an arch look from Janie: “Well, when’ll you know?” They know immediately because each time they kiss they hear a bell peal.

Tom, Dick and Harry is a hilarious and nearly perfect vehicle for the Miss Rogers’ Tillie-the-Toiler talents. But much credit belongs to the artful direction of balding, hawk-faced Garson Kanin (Bachelor Mother, My Favorite Wife), who never lets go the reins until the horse is in the barn. Another Hollywood youngster (26), Paul Jarrico, is author of the story and the script. Private Kanin, now 28 and in the U.S. Army, says: “Anybody can direct a good picture if he’s got a good script.”

The Bride Came C. O. D. (Warner) is a hot-weather hors d’oeuvre. It offers the curious spectacle of the screen’s most talented tough guy (James Cagney) roughhousing one of the screen’s best dramatic actresses (Bette Davis) through ten reels of slapsticky summertime comedy. The result, seldom hilarious, is often funny.

Bette Davis asked for it. Almost invariably cast as an indoor girl who prefers to do her suffering mentally, she pestered the Brothers Warner to co-star her with Rough-On-Rats Cagney. Their first get-together since 1934 (Jimmy the Gent) turns the vixenish lady into a foxy hoyden. Mr. Cagney ungently plucks cactus spines from the seat of her pants after she makes an awkward leap from their stalled plane, deliberately smacks her skull with his to drive home a point, slingshots her from the rear while she signals for help with a mirror, roils her finery in the mud of an abandoned mine.

Under this once-over-lightly procedure, familiar to Cagney fans, Miss Davis comes as leapingly alive as if she had been stuck with a pin. As Glamor Girl Joan Winfield, she is boredly eloping with a noisome orchestra leader (Jack Carson) in Commercial Pilot Cagney’s plane when her father (Eugene Pallette) makes a deal with the aviator to deliver his daughter unmarried.

Father promises to pay $10 a pound for Cagney’s passenger, C.O.D. at Amarillo, Tex.—enough to pay the overdue installment on Cagney’s plane.

Miss Davis discovers the plot and crashes the plane in Death Valley. Then, popping her eyes and chawing her unaccustomed role with obvious delight, she proceeds to give her abductor hell in an abandoned mining town until father, a justice of the peace, a sheriff, and a posse of reporters arrive. Cagney weighs his bride in while father waits, checkbook in hand. The bride weighs 118 lb. The plane is his.

Good sequence: Cagney, returning to hungry Bette Davis after finding his way out of the abandoned mine and wolfing a meal, coaxes her into repenting her glamor girl existence in the belief that they are fated to starve to death. They kiss. Instantly Bette bounds back and smacks him one. She has tasted the telltale mustard on his lips.

The Stars Look Down (I. Goldsmith-Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) has gathered dust on M.G.M.’s shelves for over a year. Why this British film has been kept in cold storage so long is best known to M.G.M. A cinemadaptation of Author A. J. Cronin’s best-selling novel, it is a grueling, honest, effective tragedy, based on one of Great Britain’s sorriest social spectacles: the coal mines of England, Scotland and Wales.

The story of Stars is brief and bitter. A young English coal miner (Michael Redgrave) digs his way to the university for an education that may lead to Parliament and opportunity to improve his. people’s lot. Marriage with a beauteous young tart (Margaret Lockwood) blasts his career and sets him teaching school in his home town. Her infidelity nullifies the effect of his plea to an apathetic trade union to strike the mine before its greedy owners drown the miners in a worked-out coal seam. The miners drown.

Earnest moviegoers will find Stars a first-rate picture, ably directed by Britain’s Carol Reed (Night Train). Its principals’ performances are top-hole. So are the lively doings of a host of minor bit players. But most cinemaddicts will find Stars tough sledding. In its entire 99 minutes there is scarcely one lightsome moment.