The New Pictures

No Time for Love (Paramount). To prove that photography can also be art, Claudette Colbert (an artistic photographer) ventures deep into a vehicular tunnel and is confronted by brusque, briskety Fred MacMurray (a sandhog). Stripped to the belt, bawling and brawling with his fellow sandhogs, Cinemactor MacMurray strikes Cinemactress Colbert as so photogenic that she instantly sets her tripod for him. But Mr. MacMurray will have no truck with Miss Colbert's arty shallowness. Says he: "If you want to buy some muscles, go out and get yourself a cheap cut of beef."

After they have fought enough laughs to a draw, it turns out that Cinemactor MacMurray is really no sans-culotte but a brilliantly eligible engineer, complete with a degree and an invention that is tried out in a sensational, muck-drenched cave-in scene, in which the sandhog saves the lady photographer.

The principals in No Time for Love paste each other pleasantly with verbal custard pies. But the freewheeling foolishness leaves little time or energy for acting.

Higher and Higher (R.K.O.Radio). One of the most remarkable events since the Flood took place on New Year's Eve in some 50 U.S. cinegogues. On a screen wispy with angelic clouds, a clinching pair of lovers receded to a vanishing point and were replaced by a speck which grew & grew into the huge image of a gaunt, sad-eyed, solitary young man. His posture suggested St. Francis preaching to the birds, and the hysterical twittering of the audience sustained the illusion. The young man was, in fact, in his own peculiar way, delivering a benediction. He was singing, rather hoarsely and with incredible effectiveness, a little popular tune.

In their respective bailiwicks it might have been possible thus to present Hitler, Hirohito or Stalin, accompanied by the Horst Wessel song, Kimyjayo, or the Internationale. In this case, however, the apotheosis was being accorded to Frank Sinatra. The tune he was singing might well have been Lo, He Comes With Clouds Descending, but was in fact called The Music Stopped.

This scene is the climax of Sinatra's screen debut. Up to this point the debut is markedly tactful. Sinatra is surrounded by such seasoned entertainers as Leon Errol and Jack Haley. The story is carefully simpleminded. Errol appears as a piano manufacturer on the financial skids. His factotum, Jack Haley, hits on the idea of building his scullery maid (Michele Morgan) into the season's glamor girl. Sinatra, playing a character named Frank Sinatra, is simply a shy young fellow next door who has struck up a songful flirtation with the slavey.

The curious magic of Frank Sinatra's voice was described once & for all by Ludwig Bemelmans when he wrote of another popular voice (Richard Tauber's) that it made you feel the way you do when a waiter reaches under your overcoat to settle your clothing. Sinatra's voice has become a national feature comparable to Yosemite Valley or the word lubritorium. For Sinatra to have played anyone other than himself would have been as preposterously irreverent as it would be for President Roosevelt to play anyone but F.D.R.

For Sinatra to have kissed or loved or lost anyone in the picture, with any real show of feeling, might have reduced his admirers to agony. So he does none of those things. But if Sinatra must have some of the curious detached quality of a religious figure, he must also seem capably male. This tightrope RKO has walked skillfully, with one interesting exception. She is ants-in-pantsy little Marcy McGuire, who represents singlehanded the locust-swarms of adolescent girls who have so plagued Sinatra and everyone else within earshot of him. At one point she rides on his bicycle handlebars. Sinatra, for the moment permitted to be Frank, dumps her bang on her bottom, leisurely circles the wreckage, and pedals away, crooning and fancy free.

"Who We Carrying?" The train made Pasadena an hour late that morning (last Aug. 12), and 500 bobby-socked adolescents whiled away the time by crooning "O Frankie . . . close to me, Frankie. . . ." By arrangement with RKO Publicity Chief Perry Lieber, the engineer brought the train in to syncopated yanks of the whistle-cord, which drew from one brakeman the sour query, "Who we carrying? Winston Churchill?"

A man no less potent, in his way, stepped from the train, wearing a checked sport coat, a bow tie and what his studio inadequately describes as a Clark Gable grin. The air went electric with girlish voltage as the unofficial welcoming committee closed in. Next day Frank Sinatra's arrival in Hollywood forced news off nearly every front page in the U.S.

The studio gave Frank a cool reception the first day on the set. But the coolness was short-lived. Modest Frank sat around chewing the fat with whoever came handy. He made sensible suggestions, now & then, about the music; outside that field he quite as sensibly took them. This made a fine impression on everyone.

Sinatra had natural poise which served him well in front of the camera. When he and 21-year-old Barbara Hale closed in to record Sinatra's first screen kiss, Frank asked her:

"Is this your first picture, Barbara?"

"No," replied Barbara, "but it's my first big part. I've just had walk-ons."

"Well," said Frank, "this kissing stuff is just as new to me as it is to you."

At that point Producer-Director Tim Whelan suggested that if Miss Hale closed her eyes it might be of some help. "That," Frank said, "will help anybody kissing me."

Whelan scrapped the result, not for lack of merit, but because he decided it could only evoke ten show-stopping minutes of caterwauling and catalepsy. Frank's First Kiss is now planned as the piece-de-resistance of a later picture.

Hail & Farewell. Barring a mild amount of nightclub-cruising with his new & good friends the Jack Haleys, Frank did not see many people. In a back corridor of NBC, however, quite by chance, he ran spang into Bing Crosby, whom he had never met, and whom he had so admired, as a Jersey high-school kid, that he had decided to try crooning himself.

"Hi, Frank," said Bing.

"Hi, Bing," said Frank.

They shook hands and passed on.

CURRENT & CHOICE

Madame Curie (Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon; TIME, Dec. 20).

Happy Land (Don Ameche, Henry Morgan, Harry Carey; TIME, Dec. 13).

The Cross of Lorraine (Jean Pierre Aumont, Gene Kelly, Peter Lorre, Hume Cronyn; TIME, Dec. 6).

Battle of Russia (TIME, Nov. 29).

Guadalcanal Diary (William Bendix, Richard Jaeckel; TIME, Nov. 15).

The North Star (Walter Huston, Ann Harding, Erich von Stroheim; TIME, Nov. 8).

Jeannie (Barbara Mullen, Michael Redgrave; TIME, Nov. 8).

Lassie Come Home (Lassie, Roddy McDowall, Edmund Gwenn; TIME, Oct. 25)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Gary Cooper, Ingrid Bergman, Katina Paxinou; TIME, Aug. 2).

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