The New Pictures

Ziegfeld Girl (Metro -Goldwyn-Mayer) is a prodigally star-crammed, $2,000,000 exposition of how the late Florenz Ziegfeld's leggy ladies won their Zs. It is also the final glorification of Lana (The Ramparts We Watch) Turner. Henceforth the eupeptic starlet is scheduled to shroud her most publicized charms in the toga of a dramatic actress.

In Ziegfeld Girl those charms are seldom out of the camera's eye. They get Sheila Regan (Lana) into a pack of trouble. The Great Ziegfeld himself, who never appears in the picture, started it. Out spotting fresh talent for his new show, he found Sheila running an elevator. When his agent (Edward Everett Horton) arrives to tell her she is to be glorified, she is too stunned to speak. Her truck-driver boy friend (James Stewart) has to supply her address, telephone number. Told when and where to report for rehearsals, Sheila still can't answer. Says the agent, understandingly: "Nod once if you've heard me."

Once in the fold, she acquires an aging socialite (Ian Hunter), a plush Park Avenue apartment, seven diamond bracelets, six fur coats, and the eye of the gossip columnists. In the end she dies of a brandy heart--but not before she has slunk, semiclad, through sumptuous extravaganzas that make the old Ziegfeld Follies look like the East Orange Passion Play.

Not all Ziegfeld Girls turn out like Sheila. Two who glorify differently are sultry Sandra Kolter (Hedy Lamarr), who discovers that the violinist husband she left behind is more exciting than the Follies, and knock-kneed Susan Gallagher (Judy Garland), who graduates to top billing as a singer. Although their tribulations are never worth the length that short, swart Producer Pandro Berman devotes to them, Miss Garland warbles a torrid tropical tune, Minnie From Trinidad, with true professional gusto. Miss Turner manages the limbs that are to go into limbo and an occasional dramatic sequence with talent, and Miss Lamarr does not spare her uncanny physical charms.

It cost M.G.M. $5,000 to pick the chorus for Ziegfeld Girl. It was worth it. The dozen front-line show girls should paralyze the most case-hardened stage-door-Johnny. Most of them are titled: Miss North America 1940, Miss Mission Trails, Miss Pacific Coast, Miss Venus, etc. Like the Ziegfeld Girls of old, they do not have to act, just undulate.

Their undulations take place on the three ornate sets devised by begoggled Cedric Gibbons. Best of them is the Trinidad set: a forest of 150-foot bamboo trees clustered with tufted satin starfish and giant seashells.

In spite of its pretensions Ziegfeld Girl is plot-heavy, entertainment-shy. It does not come up to the master effort of Director Robert Z. Leonard--The Great Ziegfeld. But it does offer generous illustration of man's Third Basic Need.

Penny Serenade (Columbia) is a strange departure for Gary Grant and Irene Dunne from the daft hilarity of their two memorable comedies: The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife.

The carefree way in which the reporter, Roger Adams (Mr. Grant), and the music-store salesgirl, Julie (Miss Dunne), inaugurate their marriage is blasted by a Tokyo earthquake which injures her and leaves them facing a childless future. They return to the States, where Roger buys a small-town newspaper. Their life together is unhappily aimless until they adopt an orphaned infant and encounter the problems of parenthood.

When adult Hollywood stars encounter Hollywood infants, the cinemoppets generally steal the show. Stars Grant and Dunne successfully weather the serious competition of two pairs of identical twins (who play the Adams' child at different ages, one of each subbing for the other to save shooting time). The awkward, embarrassed ineptitude of their first night of parenthood is one of the most deliciously human, truly comic sequences out of Hollywood in many moons.

But Parents Grant and Dunne cannot overcome the ten-little-fingers-and-ten-little-toes plot. Written by Scripter Morrie Ryskind, produced and directed by George Stevens (Alice Adams), it is too often a moving picture which does not move. Skillful direction saves it from turning maudlin.

Good shot: Applejack (Edgar Buchanan), a shaggy, bat-eared bachelor linotype operator, deftly fitting a fresh diaper to the Adams' adopted infant while its amateur parents stand by in helpless wonderment.

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