Cinema, Also Showing Oct. 16, 1944

Heavenly Days (RKO-Radio) is that dangerous film from whose political propaganda the U.S. once proposed to protect its troops (TIME, Aug. 21). Possible reasons: 1) in a dream sequence silk-hatted Capitalist Raymond Walburn plants a spatted foot on the neck of Common Man Fibber McGee; 2) elsewhere McGee murmurs some higher economics about making supply meet demand; 3) still elsewhere, Soap-Boxer McGee denounces citizens who do not avail themselves of the privilege of voting. Aside from these bits of propaganda, Heavenly Days is a thoroughly harmless little comic strip about Fibber & Molly’s trip to Washington, and Dr. Gallup’s search for America’s Absolutely Average Man. Pleasant, corny performers with extremely experienced voices, the radio-famed McGees will doubtless roll up another million and a half dollars or so for RKO (at an outlay of some $450,000). Films such as theirs, fairly popular in big cities and beloved in the provinces, are aptly known as topnotch bread-&-butter pictures.

The Doughgirls (Warners) tardily, joins the overcrowd of comedies about overcrowded Washington, with more than the usual number of fake marriages, misunderstandings, eccentric bit-players, and mirror mazes of French-farcically-slamming doors. Doughgirls Ann Sheridan, Alexis Smith and Jane Wyman and would-be Husbands John Ridgely, Craig Stevens and Jack Carson, are joined in their already overflowing “bridal” suite by such incongruities as 1) an exuberant Russian lady sniper (Eve Arden), who insists on firing three-gun salutes out the window, 2) a pompous bureaucrat (John Alexander), who is investigating a process for turning soy beans into auto fuel, 3) another bureaucrat (Charles Ruggles), who is too amorous to keep his mind on affairs of state, 4) a G-man, a porter, two chambermaids, five babies, a proudly beavered Orthodox priest. This screen version of The Doughgirls is even louder than the stage original, but not so fast and not so funny.

Postwar Farms (MARCH OF TIME] will interest not only farmers but also those numerous urbanites who wonder wistfully how they might make out on five acres and a prayer. General answer: there is a chance for small farmers, through rural electrification and cooperatives, but not too gay or sure a one. Few or none of the returning soldiers who look forward to farming can be absorbed on the land; and the small farmer at best is threatened by the expanding immensity of 20th-century big-business farming. Most impressive—and to many, most depressing—shots in the film show the implacable march of incredibly proficient machines across vast acreages of California and New Jersey, with human beings assuming a relationship to the soil almost as impersonal as work in great factories, or in the bull pens of great companies.

The Merry Monahans (Universal), a jigsaw of nostalgic cliche, sometimes mildly pleasing, never downright unpleasant, involves vaudevillians Jack Oakie, Donald O’Connor and Peggy Ryan in one more exhumation of variety’s vanished glories. Chief problem in this one: keeping Paterfamilias Oakie, a sterling performer when sober, away from the bottle. Jack Oakie continues as amiably reliable as a merry-go-round. Miss Ryan is less rambunctious and more human than before. Donald O’Connor, besides being a solid vaudevillian, remains the most likable juvenile in pictures.