The New Pictures

Sunny (RKO Radio) came to Broadway in the dreamboat days of 1925. She was luminous Marilyn Miller, star of an English circus, and she danced and sang her musicomedy way into the arms of an ex-doughboy baritone and the hearts of Manhattan theatergoers. Of no small help to her was the catchy score by Jerome Kern, Victor Herbert's successor and equal, and the lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II. One of their tunes moved the great Critic Percy Hammond to observe: "One song entitled Who? was attractive enough to indicate that ere the snow falls it will be a pest."

Critic Hammond was in for a long pestilence. For George Olsen and His Music, then playing at Manhattan's Pennsylvania Hotel, picked Who? and made a sensational arrangement of it. Victor transferred the arrangement to a disc, and soon the exciting, eminently singable melody was the U.S.'s hit tune. Today it is a popular "classic" that has outlived both Marilyn Miller and Percy Hammond.

Neat, retiring Herbert Wilcox, British producerdirector, kept the saga of Who? in mind while making Sunny II with his sparkling British star, Anna Neagle. Profiting by the lesson of No, No, Nanette (TIME, Dec. 30), which he made without featuring the musicomedy's best assets, the tuneful score of Vincent Youmans, he plugs Who? for all it is worth. Four different orchestrations deliver it in ballad, tap, choral and semi-rumba rhythm. Three more Kern tunes (Sunny, D'Ya Love Me?, Two Little Blue Birds) are tossed in for good measure.

Although Sunny II's streamlined circus and New Orleans locale bear small resemblance to Sunny I, ex-Chorine Neagle, accompanied by the nimble, frightened feet of angular Ray Bolger, sings and dances her way delightfully into the arms of her 1941 baritone (John Carroll). No masterpiece, Sunny is pleasant entertainment.

One Night in Lisbon (Paramount). They (Fred MacMurray and Madeleine Carroll) meet in an empty air-raid shelter in London. He is a self-consciously cute American busily flying bombers to Britain. She is a rich and proper English girl dutifully chauffeuring a War Office Earl (Edmund Gwenn). He swears they made this date 10,000 years ago. She is baffled. He makes duck calls at her. She flees.

Later, at a soiree, she discovers that her shelter mate is the guest of honor. Their hostess (Billie Burke) is a giddy lady who believes that "into the life of every English girl a little American should fall." Not in sympathy with that credo, Miss Carroll scampers home, gets into bed, puts on her gas mask and ponders whether the right man could see through its ugliness into her soul. As if to find out, she crawls on all fours to a wall mirror and barks at herself.

Warned that MacMurray is a "Disturbing fellow. Upset you, in the end," she nonetheless consents to fly to Lisbon with him. Says she: "I knew he loved me the minute he told me I smelled good." Plane seats for this clandestine journey are miraculously proffered by the Earl after she remarks: "I'm only going to be there overnight." Observes he: "That ought to do it."

What he meant was that the documents planted in her luggage ought to succeed in trapping a ring of Nazi spies operating in Lisbon. They not only trap the spies but also ruin the loving couple's tryst. Whereupon, Miss Carroll and Mr. MacMurray, with the entire British Navy serving as shotgun, take off for the U.S. and marriage.

This bit of tomfoolery manages to be engaging and downright funny in spots. Beauteous Miss Carroll's virginal retreats from the ruttish advances of her pursuer are performed in her best peaches & cream manner. But the script seldom rises above its morass of cliches, damp gags, trite situations, and occasional touches of propaganda. Mr. MacMurray's noisome conception of a vigorous American is on:: that most Americans would like to keep tied up in the backyard.

One Night in Lisbon is apparently a harbinger of what Hollywood is up to now that its propaganda pictures (Pastor Hall, Mortal Storm, etc.) have fizzled.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Major Barbara (Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, Robert Newton; TIME, June 2).

A Woman's Face (Joan Crawford, Conrad Veidt, Melvyn Douglas; TIME, May 26).

Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, Dorothy Comingore, Joseph Gotten, Everett Sloane; TIME, March 17).

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