The New Pictures

And the Angels Sing (Paramount) tries for wacky comedy like a fat man trying to get over the 220 low hurdles.

The Angels are four sisters of that name in Glenby Falls, N.Y. They want to help their widowed father buy a farm where he can indulge his passion for raising soybeans. Nancy Angel (Dorothy Lamour) wants to be an artist, Bobby (Betty Hutton) an ace reporter, Patti (Mimi Chandler) a Shakespearean actress, Josie (Diana Lynn) a composer. Between daydreams and quarrels they pick up spare cash by staging musical acts at a local roadhouse. There they run afoul of a transient bandleader, Happy Marshall (Fred MacMurray), who promptly advises Cinemactress Lamour: "Let's not fight this thing, it's bigger than both of us." She is not impressed, but innocent Cinemactress Hutton is.

Happy gyps her out of her winnings at the crap table, hurries on with his insolvent boys to Schultz's Copacabana, in Brooklyn. The vengeful sisters and their father follow. From there on Happy's two-timing gets more & more complicated and less & less funny. Too much of this dizzy story shows signs of hard labor; about half is rather enjoyable. Betty Hutton (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek) gets funnier with every picture. She is the most startling expression of natural force since the Johnstown Flood.

Up in Mabel's Room (United Artists) is such a strong smell of camphor that only the most insensitive cinemoths can survive it. On the notion that a terrible wheeze, properly delivered, can be even funnier than a good one, the revival of this stone-age (1919) stage farce might have turned out very well. But all the players handle its dim demi-wit as if it were Oscar Wilde epigrams.

Out of the story, too (a man trying frantically to keep evidence of a former affair out of the hands of his suspicious bride), a fairly amusing picture might have come. But this production runs like a remaindered edition of The 10,000 Worst Mother-in-Law Jokes.

Sample wowser:

Wife (explaining her husband's absence): "But it's business."

Mother-in-law: "You mean monkey-business."

Shouting such paralyzers at each other, and dodging in & out of each other's embraces, recriminations, trousers, lingerie and bedroom doors like so many harassed trout are Cinemactors Dennis O'Keefe, Lee Bowman, John Hubbard, Mischa Auer, Cinemactresses Marjorie Reynolds, Gail Patrick, Binnie Barnes. For those who are curious to see what rolled the U.S. in the aisles only 25 years ago, the show is a museum treat.

The Irish Question (MARCH OF TIME) manages with particular clarity and detached sympathy to explain 1) Eire's neutrality, 2) her intense resentment at the recent U.S. demand that she expel German and Japanese consuls and envoys. Chief explanation: Eire is very old in oppression and bitterness, very young in political independence. Her nervy neutrality is a declaration of that independence which no amount of sympathy with the

Allied cause can shake. A still more penetrating suggestion: if you want to under stand an Irishman, or the Irish, examine his passion, not his reason.

Most illuminating are the shots made under the direction of brilliant, free-lance New Zealander Len Lye (Kill or Be Killed, Colour Box), which make up the bulk of the film. Lye's Dublin streets, obsessed faces and magical landscapes (made largely in bleak Galway) capture depths of mysticism which are beyond the reach of most words.

The White Cliffs of Dover (M.G.M.) is an exquisite cinematic equivalent of the late Alice Duer Miller's best-selling poem of that title -- which, for all its sincerity, can be most kindly described as lap-doggerel. The picture, which is a 126-minute apostrophe to Beau Geste Britons and a Beau Geste Britain, may be most kindly described as somewhat pish and more than a little posh. It may well give genuine admirers of good cinema and credible Englishmen the jimjams.

It begins with a greying head nurse (Irene Dunne) waiting in a London hos pital for the return of her son from the disastrous Dieppe Commando raid. While she waits, the picture slips with a loud grinding of gears into the flashback that takes up most of the film.

In 1914 the head nurse is a broth of a girl named Susan (Miss Dunne again), accompanying her father, Hiram Porter Dunn (Frank Morgan), on a trip to England. Hiram, a 100% American, dis likes suet puddings, spends most of his time in England fighting over the War of 1812 with a 100% British Colonel (C. Aubrey Smith).

Susan spends her time being mad about English traditions. She leaps like a mating 'salmon when she hears the word "baronet." Then she bumps into one named Sir John Ashwood (Alan Marshal), complete with a family ghost. Sir John is eager to squire her Down Roman roads where Caesar's legions marched, And follow Chaucer's steps to Canterbury.

On midwar furlough in Dieppe, they hear the French townsfolk greet the U.S.

entry into World War I by singing The Star-Spangled Banner in faultless English.

After Sir John dies in battle, Susan brings up their son in England.

When World War II looms, Susan tries to take her son to the U.S. But on the boat train John II (Roddy McDowell) refuses to go. ("You durn little English man," wheezes his mother, with tearful pride.) So they stay. John flirts innocently (against Tennysonian landscapes) with a farmer's daughter until it is time for World War II. Then he joins a Commando.

Last scene: When John is brought in from Dieppe on a stretcher, his mother opens the hospital window so that he may hear the band music of the newly arrived U.S. troops. With fierce pride she describes them to her dying British son: "All the strong young boys, beautiful and proud with dreams. . . ." "God will never forgive us . . ,." adds Cinemactress Dunne, "if we break faith with our dead again."

Cobra Woman (Universal) is quite a funny picture to have been made in all seriousness.

The plot: hefty Jon Hall is about to marry a lissome South Sea Islander (Maria Montez) when she is abducted by the Cobra People, a tribe of fanatic snake-worshippers, and taken to Cobra Island, whence few escape. Mr. Hall follows, learns that his fiancee's twin sister (Maria Montez) an evil High Priestess, has got the extras so hornswoggled by her snake dance that they march straight into the mouth of an active volcano. When Hall asks Maria's grandmother, the Island's powerless Queen, why her subjects act that way, he is told: "She appeals to their emotions." Mr. Hall's fiancee, Grandmother explains, has been brought back to save the Cobra Islanders from race suicide. In due time she does--then promptly deserts them, with Cinemactor Hall.

As if Cinemactress Montez, in her strenuously unclad dual role, did not provide cheesecake enough, there is also Sabu in a pair of trig bathing trunks. A big boy now, and still growing, Sabu looks more like Elephant Boy than when he made the picture so called. Most conservatively dressed member of the cast is a chimpanzee.

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