The New Pictures

Slightly Dangerous (M.G.M.) is a mildly loony comedy starring Lana Turner and Robert Young. In some never-never prewar world, it reveals a small-town soda jerkess who tries every trick from feigned amnesia to the long-lost-heiress act to crash the gate to money and glamor. On her silly trail throughout is her soda-fountain boss, Robert Young, with whom she finally clinches in a motel bedroom. The dialogue of this scene is laundered white for all possible audiences. But Lana, in a costume change from her conventional sweater, still manages to undo all attempts at censorship by her adroit management of an old-fashioned camisole.

Notable bit: white-tied Alan Mowbray, quite sufficiently listed as an "English Gentleman," dislocating the rest of the film by his monumental, effortless detachment towards Robert Young, his own surroundings, and the comedy in general.

Next of Kin (Ealing-Universal) is a British War Office film originally made to teach soldiers to keep their mouths shut. It is also a successful spy thriller which broke box-office records in England. For its quality of skillful melodrama alone, it is a fascinator for soldiers and civilians alike.

German secret agents gather their in formation by eyes and ears, communicate the more urgent bits by radio. One of them, a stripteaser, cultivates an innocent soldier in the 95th Brigade. She easily learns, one night backstage, that his brigade is moving. That is only a beginning for German Intelligence Headquarters, which promptly assigns two men to the job of discovering the English plan and destination. From scraps of information, each almost meaningless in itself, these spies deduce the imminence of a commando raid and its objective, a submarine base on the French coast. Result: the English are trapped when they land, and almost totally wiped out.

The film is definitely not documentary. It is made on the sound pedagogic assumption that intelligent entertainment is more instructive than flat information. It lacks the final polish which might set it beside such masterpieces of mystery and adventure as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. But, like those films, it is notable for shrewd casting, unidealized camera work, and imaginative sound. These factors help this military training film to hold and excite a civilian audience, and thus to widen its effectiveness.

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