The New Pictures, Sep. 8, 1941

Whistling in the Dark (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is not the funniest picture out of Hollywood. But it has enough effective low comedy to ease M.G.M.’s brand-new cinecomic down the ways without swamping him. This newest addition to Hollywood’s fast-growing flotilla of former burlesque comedians is a bristly, uninhibited, redheaded young man named Red Skelton, who looks and acts not unlike Comedian Bob Hope.

As The Fox, a radio Sherlock Holmes, brash Mr. Skelton has become a national byword because of his beguiling skill at inventing and solving murder mysteries and sundry crimes. Such is his fame that he is kidnapped by a racketeering evangelist (Conrad Veidt) for the express purpose of devising a police-proof way of eliminating a human stumbling block to an inheritance the cultist has his eye on. Put to the test, The Fox—assisted by some expert mugging and a knowledge of radios —not only traps the evangelist but manages to produce considerable hilarity in the process.

Although Whistling is Comic Skelton’s first starring performance, it is by no means his best. His masterpiece is on ice at M.G.M. Made a year or so ago as a screen test, it turned out so slaphappily (mainly because of its doughnut-dunking sequence) that down-in-the-mouth producers, directors and such at the studio are forever running it off when they need some laughs.

No laugh was Skelton’s first screen test in 1932. Some bemused underling thought he was a romantic lead, gave him a dramatic test. The result was painful for all concerned. Son of an oldtime circus clown, Skelton had spent half his 19 years trying to make people laugh in medicine shows, on Mississippi river boats, in burlesque, vaudeville, the circus, Walkathons. He had already been thwarted in his life’s ambition—lion taming—which dissolved one day when he saw Clyde Beatty clawed in the ring. The screen test over, he returned to vaudeville.

Two years earlier he had made the best deal of his career. Playing a burlesque house in Kansas City, he was hired to fill in at a nearby vaudeville house for an act which failed to show up. His routine consisted principally of falling into the orchestra pit and coming up with a bass drum wrapped around his neck. A pretty usherette thought the act was so bad that she complained to the manager. Skelton was fired. Few months later he married the usherette.

Under the competent guidance of Mrs. Edna Skelton the comic began to amount to something. She wrote routines, made him study with a tutor until he got a high-school diploma, worked his salary up to $300 a week. Daughter of an undertaker she had just completed a course in embalming prior to her marriage. Skelton has never forgotten his friends’ warnings that if he married her she could easily slit him open while he slept, pump him full of embalming fluid. Says he: “To this day I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat. . . . I have to go out of the room when she slices bread.”

At present Edna Skelton’s husband (whose adopted coat of arms is a redheaded skull and crossbones) is handsomely repaying his wife’s loving care. Solidly bolted to the M.G.M. payroll for $1,500 weekly, he has finished Lady Be Good, is now making another musical, Panama Hattie. Although his oldtime medicine-show manners (telling stories at the top of his voice, howling, gesturing violently) occasionally get him out of line, Edna tempers his healthy conceit. Seldom without an unlighted cigar in his mouth or hand, he neither smokes nor drinks. He makes a rule of never answering the telephone—afraid of making a deal that Edna wouldn’t like.

Dive Bomber (Warner) is a 133-minute glorification of the U.S. Navy air arm and its flight surgeons. Most of it was shot at the Naval Air Station at San Diego. Some of it—especially the scenes aboard the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Saratoga—is almost straight documentary. All of it is an extravagant display of millions of dollars worth of armament gaily photographed in Technicolor.

Less can be said of Dive Bomber’s plot. Elegant Errol Flynn goes about a flight surgeon’s business of keeping the boys flying with genteel unreality. Belligerent Fred MacMurray, ace pilot, eventually sees the light and helps the surgeon design a high altitude pressure suit which costs MacMurray his life.

Dive Bomber has all the flying an aviation cinemaddict can take at one sitting. Fleets of new and old-type multi-colored Navy bombers, fighters and patrol ships continuously roar down the sound track, in and out of formation. All’s well with today’s Navy—save one thing: Flyers Flynn and MacMurray are so absorbed in their work that they let big, blonde, beauteous Alexis Smith, the heroine of the picture, wander off in the end with the Marines.