The New Pictures

Having Wonderful Time (RKO

Radio) may well astound cinemaddicts who saw the comedy by the same name on the Manhattan stage a year ago. To playgoers, the particular merits of Arthur Kober's study of a group of unmoneyed young New Yorkers vacationing in the Berkshires were that all of the visitors at Kamp Kare-Free were unmistakably denizens of The Bronx and that the author had caught, with sympathy but cruel precision, all the semi-miraculous gradations of Bronx Jewish dialect. As presented on the screen, nothing but the name of the camp, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.'s aquiline profile, and a few traits recognizable only to the student of the New York melting pot, identify the characters of Having Wonderful Time. In response to the wishes of the Hays office, which also effected a few improving variations on the morals of the personages involved, the heroine's name was changed from Teddy Stern to Teddy Shaw, the hero's from Chick Kessler to Chick Kirkland. Aaronson and Rappaport were Anglicized respectively as Armbruster and Beatty, and even "Itchy" Flexner, the buffoon of the piece, was, according to Author Kober, "forced to change his proud family name to Faulkner."

In projecting Broadway plays through the magnifying lenses of the cinema, minor alterations like these are usually inevitable. Fortunately, there was one Jewish name which the producers of Having Wonderful Time were not forced to change: the author's. Given the job of killing many of his own best lines, Author Kober did so with purposeful objectivity. He also supplied new ones which were in many cases even better. Consequently, like an enlarged photograph which brings out virtues unsuspected in its smaller original, the cinema version of Having Wonderful Time is a kind of streamlined folk comedy, hilarious not because its characters are Jewish but because they are human.

Chick (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) works at Kamp Kare-Free as waiter, porter and dancing partner to wallflower female guests. Teddy (Ginger Rogers) comes there to spend the two weeks which are her annual reward for 50 weeks of drudgery as a Manhattan stenographer. They quarrel, make up, and fall in love. The incidents of their romance are pathetically meagre--dances to the music of the camp band, a brief mutual inspection of the moon, a single excursion by canoe to Eagle Rock. Behind these incidents, imprinted with the devastating clarity of a picture-post card, is an animated bird's-eye view of thousands of U. S. summer days at thousands of U. S. Kamp Kare-Frees --the crude japeries of the camp's recreational director, the oily friendliness of the proprietor, the wreckage caused by a thunderstorm on the night of a Japanese lantern fiesta, the iron insistence with which a tipsy party marches up and down singing "Hi Ho, Hi Ho, Off to Work We Go."

White Banners (Warner Bros.) continues the campaign of moral uplift which its author, Lloyd Cassel Douglas, started in Magnificent Obsession and Green Light. Central character of Green Light was a bubbly jocular minister who, when the minor characters in the story became upset, explained to them that humanity was a kind of automotive parade best governed by the traffic signals of unselfishness. In White Banners, the minister is replaced by a warm-hearted maid-of-all-work named Hannah (Fay Bainter). Otherwise, the formula is much the same. When Hannah straggles into the household of a high-school science teacher (Claude Rains), she turns out to be a jewel with a heart of gold. Besides lavishly fulfilling her exacting duties, Hannah sells the contents of the family basement at fabulous prices, facilitates a budding romance between young Sally Ward (Bonita Granville) and Peter Trimble (Jackie Cooper), stimulates Paul Ward to invent not one but two different types of automatic icebox, and cures Mrs. Ward of the chronic droops. By all this audiences are prepared to believe in the denouement of the story and the omnipotence of the Golden Rule.

Neatly produced by Hal B. Wallis, earnestly directed by Edmund Goulding, handsomely performed by its well-chosen cast, White Banners thus turns out to be a smooth, ennobling circus, which should surprise and gratify those who look for sermons in shows and books on double bills. Typical shots: Hannah smiling bravely when Sally breaks a plate; when Pete is impertinent; when Paul Ward has a tantrum.

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