Cinema, Also Showing Oct. 12, 1942

Iceland (20th Century-Fox) turns the U.S. subarctic outpost into a kind of snow-train resort for the U.S. Army (John Payne, Jack Oakie) and a 40,000-sq. mi. skating rink for Sonja Henie. Its plot puts a familiar theme on skates—girl (Miss Henie) grabs boy (Mr. Payne), boy flees girl, girl gets boy. The outcome is more than usually foreseeable since Cinemactress Henie is a much better skater than Cinemactor Payne. Like most Henie pictures, Iceland’s best sequences are Sonja’s. She does Japanese acrobatics on ice, a V for Victory routine, an ice hula. Clowning Jack Oakie helps out with timely pratt-falls.

Get Hep to Love (Universal) features limber-larynxed Gloria Jean as an overexploited child coloratura who, after wistfully whining “I want hot dogs—and love,” runs out on her money-mad aunt. She goes up to Connecticut and adopts a pair of small-town parents, who don’t realize whom they are sheltering, and put her in high school. Gloria is not shown eating any hot dogs, but she does get a certain amount of love, as it is practiced among the school’s downy-cheeked jitterbugs who ask: “Can I borrow your frame for the frenzy?” For a time it looks as if Gloria might lose her boy to a rival who is well known, in the local dialect, to be not only a bundlebunny but a snugglepup. In the long run, Miss Jean’s crinkly soprano conquers all.