The New Pictures

Adventure (M.G.M) brings ex-Major Clark Gable back to the screen and gives him Greer Garson as leading lady. In terms of marquee appeal, this combination generates high voltage. It also happens to generate as bright a piece of cinema comedy as has shown up this season.

The story is an odd hodgepodge of farce and parable, derived--almost by brute force--from Clyde Brion Davis' novel, The Anointed. The novel recounted the modest adventures of a philosophical sailor named Harry Patterson. As transmuted by the Hollywood alchemists, Harry Patterson becomes Clark Gable, a noisy, sociable bosun, while the seagoing philosopher is a broken-down Irish deck hand (Thomas Mitchell). Trouble begins when the two of them drift into the San Francisco Public Library to do a little research on the matter of the Irishman's soul. There, looking icy and poised behind her librarian's desk, is Miss Garson. She seems bright enough to know a lot about the soul, not bright enough to steer clear of Gable.

From here on in, things develop into a kind of actors' field day, with alternations of slapstick and high comedy, carefully understated emotion, and plain-&-simple bathos. Before he is through, Director Victor Fleming (Gone With the Wind) manages to lug in almost everything except a flood, a fire, an Indian massacre and a trained collie. But the dialogue somehow holds up under the strain, and there are a few wonderful sequences: Joan Blondell as the life of a rowdy party; Gable on a supercilious tour through a farmhouse; Gable and Garson engaged in a hen hunt. Adaptable Cinemactress Garson, frequently cast in heavy-heroine or merely mealy parts, carries off her role with sparkle. But the steady gleam of the picture is the inimitable, jug-eared, perdurable Clark Gable, 45, back from the wars and still going strong.

Veteran cinemaddicts have long known by heart most of the public details* of Clark Gable's private life. But moviegoing youngsters may find it hard to believe that Gable was already going great guns when Van Johnson was just learning to shave, and Frank Sinatra growing out of knee pants.

By no means Hollywood's handsomest leading man, but probably the one most admired by cinemaddicts of both sexes, Gable was born in Cadiz, Ohio, in 1901, and got his first stage experience as prop boy in an Akron stock company. He had ups & downs on Broadway and in stock. Then, after several years of trying to crash the screen, he was given his first sizable Hollywood role in 1931 (The Easiest Way, with Constance Bennett). By 1932 he was ranked among the top ten U.S. money-making stars. During the next decade he played opposite such glittering screen favorites as Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Lana Turner. By 1934 he had made It Happened One Night, with Claudette Colbert, and with the won the Academy award.

It Happened One Night was not one of the colossal box-office draws of all time. But it set a new standard for cinema comedy, and much of the credit rightfully went to Gable's witty, fast-paced performance. He has managed through the years to keep up the pace, if not always the wit; a full Gable catalogue would include several dozen pictures ranging in altitude from the high-flown, windy Gone, which was hardly his fault, to the lowdown, torrid Somewhere I'll Find You, brought out shortly after he left Hollywood in 1942 to join the Army.

Adventure was clearly carpentered to fit the old Gable formula, and ex-aerial-gunner-photographer Gable himself fits the formula as smoothly and as agreeably as ever. If he is a little chubbier around the jowls, he is still able to sling his weight around--and in his bright eye is the same old wicked fire.

Life with Baby (MARCH OF TIME) attempts to explain to parents why Baby sometimes does not seem to behave like a civilized human being. Based largely on pictures shot through a so-called "one-way-vision dome" at Yale University's Clinic of Child Development (conducted by famed Dr. Arnold Gesell and staff), it shows actual examples of Baby's coming to grips with the world: at four weeks barely able to move the head, at four months gaining control of the fingers, at four years able to stick out the tongue at whoever happens to be handy. The film provides a quick glance at the normal patterns of infant behavior, and suggests that if parents understood these patterns better, there would be less worrying, less nagging and less slapping.

Sample details: marriage to his dramatic coach, Josephine ("He hasn't forgotten a thing I taught him") Dillon, several years his senior, ended in divorce, 1930; marriage to wealthy Texas Widow Ria Langham, also several years his senior, tnded in divorce, 1939; marriage, regarded by fan magazines as a "true love" match, to famed blon.de Cinemactress Carole Lombard, ended by her death in a Nevada air crash, January 1942. Recently Gable has squired ex-Model Anita ("The Face") Colby (TIME, Jan. 8, 1945), blonde Cinemactress Virginia Grey, and moneyed Widow Laura ("Dolly") Hylan Heminway Fleischmann O'Brien.

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