Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 12, 1949

I Was a Male War Bride. (20th Century-Fox) is a bedroom farce with a scattering of laughs which are muffled by as thick a mixture of stale crumbs and old chestnuts as Hollywood has ever stuffed into a high-priced turkey.

Buried in the stuffing is a situation dear to the hearts of farce writers: the plight of a manly newly wed (Gary Grant) who is prevented by twists of the plot from getting to bed with his bride (Ann Sheridan). Here the situation is rigged on a fresh but frail device that crumbles under ponderous handling. To join his WAG Lieut. Sheridan, whose outfit is leaving Germany, Frenchman Grant must be deployed as an “alien spouse” through the U.S. Army’s channels for delivering European brides to their G.I. husbands.

Even by overworking Grant’s predicament to the last adolescent titter, Male War Bride’s three scripters have been unable to stretch it to the picture’s length. By evident default, fully half the film must first detail the couple’s courtship, a fixed bout in the battle of the sexes.

Filmed on German locations, Male War Bride uses well-photographed landscapes as backdrops for its pratfalls and manages somehow to turn occupied Germany into a comic-opera set, peopled by quaint peasants and toy soldiers. With no dialogue worthy of deft Comedian Grant, it makes its major bid for comedy by turning him into a female impersonator.

Yes Sir, That’s My Baby (Universal-International) is strictly seersucker cinema with one eye on the hot-weather box-office and the other on the football season. Its five gridiron heroes, headed by a gangling quarterback (Donald O’Connor) are ex-G.I. students who are also henpecked husbands and harassed fathers. Their five wives, captained by Gloria De Haven, are all psychology students determined to reduce their husbands to baby burpers and dishwashers. The obvious problem, in due course obviously solved: Who is going to carry the ball for the glory of dear old Granger?

The comedy situations are irrepressibly coy; the songs and dances remorselessly routine. Most pointed comment on the movie’s pace: the glazed look of indifference on the faces of the five babies.

Sword in the Desert (Universal-International) indicates that the warriors of Israel, in their crusade against the Arabs and the British, may be the heroes of a new rash of fictional melodramas. In this slow stalking of the Palestine situation, the British are pictured as fatuous sports, the Arabs as a colorfully comic tribe of three—occasionally seen in the background taking a hefty spit at a Jewish armored truck—and the Jews as total heroes. The worldwide political snafu that preceded Israel’s rebirth is boiled down to the smuggling of Jewish D.P.s through British patrols, a one-sided desert scramble that resembles a gang of dead-end kids working against one slow-thinking cop. The same Englishmen who watched Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart win World War II take a brass-knuckle beating in Sword’s ostensibly fair-to-everybody script. When the Voice of Israel (Marta Toren) is captured, a Tommy bucks her up by remarking, “I say, what rotten luck!”

In this slate-smooth hide & seek, there is so much daydreamy standing around that everyone seems to get captured at least twice. Under George Sherman’s direction, the picture moves with somnambulist deliberateness and Dana Andrews continues his ponderous new style of acting like a mutinous galley slave. The other principals behave in harrowing situations like mechanical toys that need winding. A new actor, Jeff Chandler, registers a slow magnetic power similar to Gregory Peck’s, and is apt to become at least half as popular. Stephen McNally, oddly the only one in the movie who tries for a Jewish accent, misses it spectacularly.

This B film, more or less successfully masquerading as an A-with-a-Cause, has certain virtues: though four-fifths of the footage consist of phosphorescent Christmas card night scenes produced through a new use of infrared film, the rest of it—a porridge-colored dawn landing of the immigrants and the bright dusty midday scenes around a desert village—is visually exciting.

Once More, My Darling (Neptune Productions; Universal-International), produced by Joan Harrison and directed by Robert Montgomery—the team which made Ride the Pink Horse—is a fluffy comedy in which the fluff often gets in the way of the fun. As a young lawyer turned actor turned investigator for the U.S. Army, Montgomery is assigned the job of solving the disappearance of some famous jewels. To get at the jewels, he has to pretend to marry a man-eating debutante (Ann Blyth) who, without any pretense at all, is determined to marry him.

By spirited pacing and exaggeration Director Montgomery has made the most of his synthetic plot—which is still not quite enough. There are hints that the picture was intended as a burlesque of a familiar type of grade B melodrama. But with its air of sly sophistication it could also be taken as a subtler parody of standardized featherbrain farce. Every now & then, in unexpected bits of dialogue and situation, the film shows a fresh comic touch, but most of its effort is frittered away in indecision.

It’s a Great Feeling (Warner) is another clownish musical harnessing Jack Carson and Doris Day to the formula used in My Dream Is Yours, which they recently dragged through the neighborhood circuits. Doris is again the little girl with a big voice, in search of a still bigger career. Carson is the man to help her. His help, as usual, is mostly hindrance.

To make certain that the old gags and gimmicks will still work, the studio has wrapped them all up in one supercolossal gag. The whole plot takes place on the Warner Bros. lot. Carson and Dennis Morgan, exuding arch embarrassment, play their real-life selves. So do Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Errol Flynn and a few other Warner stars who have been rushed on for bit roles. For ardent movie fans, these peeks at the great may help carry the film. But for most moviegoers, the spoofing is hardly good enough to conceal the laborious spadework.