The New Pictures

They Met in Bombay (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) awards frog-voiced Clark Gable the Victoria Cross. This fast-and-loose play with Great Britain's most coveted decoration is not likely to please the British or amuse Americans. How the decoration comes about is very odd.

Into a palmy Bombay hotel purrs Mr. Gable, mustachios akimbo. He is a high-hat English jewel thief posing as a Lloyd's of London sluefoot. Behind him undulates Rosalind Russell, clad in a white hat the size of a Syrian water wheel. She, too, is a gem thief, but posing as a baroness. One look at her and Actor Gable begins leering, ogling, wriggling his mustaches. It is Empire Day and the two carat-coppers are, unknown to each other, after a very heavy stone named the Star of Asia, which customarily swings from the wrinkled neck of the Duchess of Beltravers (Jessie Ralph).

This hoary plot blossoms like a star shell after the beauteous pair escape to Hong Kong with their love and the Star of Asia. There Mr. Gable dons an army captain's uniform to rob a Chinese, only to find himself inadvertently evacuating British nationals from a city beleaguered by the Japanese. Amid a multitude of jabbering Japanese, sheet-iron tanks and other M.G.M. props, versatile Captain Gable, singlehanded, routs the invaders. Having exhausted the possibilities of the summer's foremost cinematic absurdity, Bombay swiftly rewards its wounded hero and dispatches him to prison (to pay the Hays office for his crimes), neglecting, in its closing haste, to salve the injured feelings of the Japanese.

Moon Over Miami (20th Century-Fox) is a melancholy musical whose principals pass most of their Technicolored time between numbers bemoaning their poverty. It was happier three years ago as a movie called Three Blind Mice.

The mice in this version are blonde, lithe Carole Landis, and blonder, plumper Betty Grable, cast as leggy cheesecake queens of a Texas highway hot-dog stand, who try to parlay a small legacy into a millionaire husband. Unfortunately, their daily double (Don Ameche) is scratched. He was a millionaire until his family business folded, day before yesterday.

Before the snagging of a solid millionaire (Robert Cummings) resolves this fiscal impasse, Moon has used up seven woefully unimaginative tunes, the pneumatic assets of the Misses Grable, Landis, Cobina Wright Jr., the semitropical color and languor of Miami, the devilishly clever, coy stock-in-trade that passes for acting with Mr. Ameche, and $1,000,000 worth of Darryl Zanuck's money.

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