The New Pictures

Janie (Warner), according to the studio handouts, "is today's 16-year-old; vibrant, clear-eyed, frank and astonishingly well-poised." Since adolescent poise still astonishes millions of people and adolescent vibrations still roll most adults in the aisles, it is a safe bet that Janie will clean up as tidily at cinema box offices as it did on Broadway (TIME, Sept. 21, 1942).

At the start Janie (Joyce Reynolds) likes to doubletalk and to schmooze with drab civilian "Scooper" Nolan (Dick Erdman) at blanket parties. Then the Army arrives, to use Janie's home town as a base for maneuvers, and Janie puts away childish things. Thereafter Private Dick Lawrence (Robert Hutton) maneuvers exclusively with her.

Janie's father (Edward Arnold), who publishes the town paper, writes a blast about youth's pitfalls, but while his wife (Ann Harding) and his best friend (Robert Benchley) demur, the mote in his own eye grows to beam size. Janie, one night when the family is out, arranges to vibrate with Pvt. Lawrence in the privacy of her home. Thanks to Scooper, who is mad with jealousy, and to her little sister Elspeth (Clare Foley) who combines the less endearing features of a stool pigeon, a blackmailer and the Marquis de Sade, they get no privacy. By the time Janie's parents get home, along with the town police and a batch of MPs, there is precious little home to get to. Janie promptly sweetens everybody's temper with a strong plea for letting youth, inexperience and lonely soldiers do as much for every U.S. home.

The Canterville Ghost (M.G.M.) is a tub of ectoplasm (Charles Laughton) whose cowardice, in a bygone century, caused his brave old father to wall him up in the family castle. The unhappy ghost was doomed to walk the night until some male Canterville should give a good account of himself in battle. But throughout Britain's embattled history, Cantervilles left only a trail of white feathers.

One day the Canterville birthmark was discovered on the neck of a U.S. soldier (Robert Young) billeted at Canterville Castle. When the ghost and little Lady Jessica (Margaret O'Brien) told him that his heroism must lay the Canterville ghost, G.I. Young was scared to death. But in the long run he proved himself a red-blooded American.

Fantasy, like realism, pays off only when it is created with fingers instead of thumbs. The best of this film is Laughton's broad hamming of the hammy ghost and some friendly moments between Miss O'Brien and Mr. Young. But not all the comedy is ghostly. One of the picture's funniest scenes shows G.I.s, abashed by M.G.M.'s conception of aristocratic England, trying to be graceful with their teacups.

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