The New Pictures

Best Foot Forward (M.G.M.) is an effervescent edition of the Broadway musical hit by the young, of the young and, especially, for the young. It has almost the same cast, but Winsocki prep school has become a military academy (uniforms look nice in Technicolor) and who should be playing for the prom but Harry James, the Svengali of the Solid Senders.

Pretty, comical Lucille Ball, with her high pile of fiery hair, plays the movie queen who accepts an invitation to the Winsocki prom as a sound publicity stunt. This is immensely embarrassing to the kid (Tommy Dix), who never expected his invitation to be taken seriously, and to his girl friend (Virginia Weidler), who finds herself a wallflower while the cadet corps make Lucille the belle of a brawl. Before the end of it, she has been stripped to her slip by souvenir hunters and has ricocheted among as many closets as the heroines of French bedroom farce. But the fun all remains well within Hays office limits and thrives on the milk-fed energy of its participants.

Harry James and his band rock Winsocki to its foundations--the ballroom scene demands that the spectator love the Jamesian trumpet as St. Francis loved the birds. (Harry's rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumble Bee makes the old-fashioned trumpet solo sound like a first lesson in occupational therapy.) But once the maestro parks his horn and takes the floor with bouncing, pint-sized Nancy Walker for a comedy dance which is the high point of the whole proceedings.

Background to Danger (Warner) stars George Raft and Sydney Greenstreet as opposing merchants of menace in neutral Turkey. Raft, as a patent-leathery G-man, comes into possession of a "Russian plan to invade Turkey" forged by the Nazis and intended to drive Turkey into Germany's embrace. With these hot documents the fat Gestapo agent Greenstreet would like to warm his hands. But when he gives Raft the third degree on the subject of the papers' hiding place, the G-man is rescued by a Russian agent played by the supersinister Peter Lorre.

Thus Hollywood assembles a potentially terrifying trio. Unfortunately, they are not given a very ominous score to play. Lorre eventually gets killed off. Raft makes too many narrow escapes from Greenstreet for credibility. And, for the purposes of action, Greenstreet talks too much in his best English accent.

Heaven Can Wait (20th Century-Fox) is a lengthy but frequently funny life history of an old New York skirt chaser (Don Ameche) from his brownstone puberty to his overripe old age. For years Director Ernst Lubitsch has been able to see more light touches in his cigar smoke than ever appeared in his scripts, and this Technicolored fantasy is no exception. The Lubitsch approach brings comic relief to such weary devices as the French governess, the son who is altogether too much like his wayward father, and the final personal interview with the Devil. When Lubitsch's delicate invention lags, many spectators will be only too glad to concentrate on the Eastern beauty of Gene Tierney as the one true love of Ameche's life. Had Ameche died 20 years earlier, audiences would laugh no less, grow less weary.

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