The New Pictures

Coney Island (20th Century-Fox). The Technicolor cameras of this picture will turn many a spectator green with envy. They have been allowed a prolonged fondling of Betty Grable. Behind and around her moves a recreation of vintage-1905 sporting life with a noisy host of roisterers, pitchmen, barflies, and by-no-means-innocent bystanders. Miss Grable's tunes, dances, and virtually unprintable person will take full care of the general public. Film epicures will also be ravished by unoriginal but wonderful color-camera work on the gaudy, splendidly researched subject of oldtime Coney-Island-by-the-Sea.

Green-suited Eddie Johnson (George Montgomery) is a gambler out of work. His old colleague Joe Rocco (Cesar Romero) has done better: he owns the fanciest joint in Coney and employs Kate Farley (Betty Grable) as his star entertainer. Johnson sets up a rival establishment and starts stealing Rocco's talent as well as his business. Amidst the chicanery and the fisticuffing, Miss Grable shapes a fine career for herself on Broadway and in the arms of the man who was down but never out. She has always had a gift for looking well in the fewest possible clothes; she looks even better in the rococco upholsteries of the century's turn. Among those who pay tribute to her is a low-comedy horse (see cut).

To stern critics of the cinema Coney Island will be just one more tin bead on the rope Hollywood never ceases to string. But cinemaddicts who pay to get in will go easier on it; in fact they will go for it. Many cheap baubles have lovely sides in certain lights: this one shines irresistibly in such scenes as a brawl in a Coney harem. Here all the succulent paraphernalia of 1905 eroticism get heaved about in fearful confusion--carved brass hookahs caught in ripped gauze, brocaded draperies from the mysterious East, feathers and chandeliers, pillows of plush and satin, even one or two preserved starfish.

Bombardier (RKO-Radio) is a Hollywood salute to the Norden bomb sight, which is at one point tenderly compared with the goose that laid the golden egg. Before Pearl Harbor, Major Davis (Pat O'Brien) believes in the bomb sight. His friend Captain Oliver (Randolph Scott) scorns it. At their New Mexican training field, Davis' pretty secretary (Anne Shirley) romantically if irrelevantly pads out the footage. The bomb sight argument is finally settled in a night raid on Tokyo, when Captain Oliver compensates for his former skepticism by making a Japanese aircraft factory (and himself) a fiery tar get for the Norden needle-threader.

There are some fine flying scenes in Bombardier, and its generally muscular tone compares favorably with that of such weak, routine productions as Aerial Gunner. But Bombardier must compete with no less beautiful flying sequences in at least a half-dozen other U.S. films, and with the British minor masterpiece Target for Tonight (TIME, Nov. 3, 1941), which makes most flying films before and since seem superfluous. Bombardier has, further, to clear Anne Shirley every time it leaves the ground, and from time to time it crashes into insurmountable dialogue. Sample lulu: "Go ahead, Buck--make tomorrow's headlines."

Mister Big (Universal) is a fatuous romp celebrating the national affliction known as jitterbugging. It features cocky, young Donald O'Connor, 15-year-old Gloria Jean, prancing Peggy Ryan and a number of songs of which one is appropriately called Rude, Crude and Unattractive. The plot has to do with a theatrical school which contemplates a performance of Sophocles' Antigone. As soon as the music teacher is revealed to be none other than a boogie-woogie artist of rank, Greek tragedy is abandoned for young Donald's swingtime musical comedy. This effort attracts several Broadway producers and, flushed with his triumph, Donald steals away with Gloria for a strawberry special. Mature audiences who commit the indiscretion of attending this picture will be apt to feel that the punishment zoots the crime.

Aerial Gunner (Paramount). A tough alumnus of the slums (Chester Morris) who hated the son of the school principal (Richard Arlen) finds himself in command of that prodigy at an Army gunnery school in Texas. Both boys are in love with the sister (Lita Ward) of another student. Not until they meet the enemy somewhere in the Pacific do they resolve their personal difficulties--Chester Morris dies a noble death saving his rival and their grounded bomber from Japanese infantry.

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