Cinema: The New Comedies

Where the Boys Are (Euterpe; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is one of those pictures every intelligent moviegoer will loathe himself for liking—a corny, phony, raucous outburst of fraternity humor, sorority sex talk and housemother homilies that nevertheless warms two hours of winter with a travel-poster tanorama of fresh young faces, firm young bodies and good old Florida sunshine.

Suggested by a story in TIME (April 13, 1959), Where the Boys Are describes one of the more frantic phenomena of the affluent society: the annual Spring-Ding or Florida Flip of the book-bashed, sun-starved North American undergraduate. Come Easter vacation, students from all over the Northeast and Midwest pile into anything that holds gas and roar south. In recent years, more than 20,000 of these “migratory shirkers” have settled for the two-week season in Fort Lauderdale, and there the camera finds them—soaking up sun and beer, sleeping twelve to a motel cell or two to a car trunk, and assiduously playing the great American game of “separating the girls from the Girl Scouts.”

Teen Topic A among the three leading ladies of this picture: Should a Girl Scout trade her merit badge for a wedding ring, for a fraternity pin, or just for the hell of it? Two of the girls (Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss) play it safe, and though they miss their fun they get their men. The third (Yvette Mimieux) plays “backseat bingo” and in the last reel finds herself all smashed up by an automobile. Not very subtle, but it squares the censor.

What squares the moviegoer, who must endure all these plotitudes, is the booming adolescent vitality of the actors. Actress Hart has a fresh-scrubbed, not-quite-grown-up charm that may make her the June Allyson of the ’60s. Soft-faced

George Hamilton looks like the Jimmy Stewart of the ’90s. Actress Prentiss emerges as a deft comedienne with a style reminiscent of the late Kay Kendall’s. Jim Hutton looks like Jim Hutton, a gangling young funnybones who already knows how to lose a laugh in order to win the audience. And Connie Francis makes a hardy, short-stemmed wallflower.

Sometimes when Scriptwriter George Wells tries to write juve-in-the-groove talk, he betrays his age (51) with the sort of yacketa (“Gee, that’s absolutely mystic!”) that may make moviegoers under 20 smile and shake their heads sadly. But when he straightens up and writes right, he gets off some pretty cute lines. He (seductively): “Tuggle, are you a good girl?” She (anxiously): “T.V., I don’t want to disillusion you.” He (eagerly) : “I won’t be disillusioned. Say anything!” She (reassured): “Yes. I am.” He (stunned): “Oh.”

The Wackiest Ship in the Army (Columbia). Comedian Jack Lemmon is a 35-year-old graduate of Andover and Harvard who somehow manages to look like The Eternal Milkman. He has nice aver age features, stands a nice average height, speaks nice average American. In a group he resembles almost anybody he happens to be standing next to; by himself he has a vague, muzzy look, as though instead of being born he had been sent by Wirephoto. His comedy is the comedy of the hopelessly normal, mass-produced joe in the hopelessly insane, mass-produced situation. In six years and 14 pictures (Mr. Roberts, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment), he has become a master of the vacant take, the eloquent huh, the rare, precise grimace, the sudden, desperate, Lemmoniacal burst of energy.

With Lemmon on deck, Ship will surely enjoy favorable gales of laughter; without him it would undoubtedly have sunk without a glug in the neighborhood “tanks.” Based on a magazine piece by Marion (See Here, Private Hargrove) Hargrove and Herb Carlson, the film is a run-of-the-main, sailor-suit farce about a peacetime yachtsman (Lemmon) who joins the Navy during World War II, and to his horror is promptly assigned to command what’s known in sailor talk as a “baldheaded schooner.” His mission: sail across about 1,000 nautical miles of Jap-infested ocean in a walloping window blind madmanned by a crew that thinks a boom is a noise, makes improper advances to the ship’s winch, can’t tell gimbals from a department store, and couldn’t sail a pea pod in a porringer.

The situation has possibilities, but neither in his script nor in his direction does Writer-Director Richard Murphy (best known for the screenplay of Compulsion) make anything like the most of them. Still, he keeps his Ship scudding along as though it had somewhere to go, and he keeps the screen jumping with excitement: enemy planes, friendly minefields, men overboard, snipers in the plastic shrubbery. Above all, he keeps his camera trained on Funnyman Lemmon, who saves scene after scene with a pert piece of mugging, and hits the jackpot on any payoff line. Recipe for Hollywood producers : tee-hee is better with Lemmon.

Marriage-Go-Round (20th Century-Fox). “Higamous hogamous! Woman’s monogamous. Hogamous higamous! Man is polygamous.” This questionable proposition, the theme of almost every sniggery story since Eve caught Adam fooling around with Lilith, served as a sort of epigraph to an anthology of off-color jokes composed in 1957 by a shrewd young man named Leslie Stevens and palmed off on the Broadway public as a play. Partly because the jokes were slickly written, mostly because they were deftly read by two famous charm merchants (Charles Boyer, Claudette Colbert) and a well-stacked skyscraper (Julie Newmar), the play was a mash hit and ran more than a year.

The $3,000,000 Deluxe Colored screen version of the play, written and produced by Playwright Stevens, lacks two of the Broadway principals and most of the bawdier jokes. Instead of Boyer and Colbert, the picture offers James Mason, an actor who could not crack a joke if it was a lichee nut, and Susan Hayward, a bargain-basement Bette Davis whose lightest touch as comedienne would stun a horse.

Luckily, the picture retains Show Girl Newmar, a behemoth blonde who looks like a giraffe redecorated by Helena Rubinstein. Unluckily, the picture also retains the play’s plot, in which Newmar, a my-body-and-your-brains crank on genetics, tries to persuade Mason, a happily married professor, to pop into bed with her, just once, so that she can become “the mother of a perfect child.” After 98 tedious and repetitive minutes, the viewer may yearn to recommend artificial insemination.