The New Pictures

The Sailor Takes a Wife (M-G-M). In the surest-fire Hollywood tradition, a sailor (Robert Walker) meets a girl (June Allyson) in Manhattan. He sweet-talks and kisses her in a taxi in Central Park, marries her that same night in Connecticut before going back to his ship. It is all very fast, young and foolish.

But a gayer younglove yarn than Sailor rarely turns up on the screen. Director Richard Whorf has come within a couple of ticks of making something as good as The Clock (TIME, May 14). Racier and rowdier, Sailor has The Clock's tenderness and sentimental charm (plus moments of mere cuteness), considerably more pace and broad humor.

A hang-fire Walker-Allyson honeymoon is what keeps the picture going. Unexpectedly discharged from the Navy, the sailor turns up grinning at the door before his wife has even made the bed in their new apartment. To complicate matters, there are Janitor Eddie ("Rochester") Anderson, who operates the apartment with frenetic care; an English-language-butchering Rumanian siren (Audrey Totter); a grave young pot tycoon named Freddie Potts (Hume Cronyn') ; and a rival potter (Reginald Owen).

Some of the situations are tried, true and a little tired. But the Rumanian siren, speaking sonorously in a participial dialect of her own, is a fresh creation; and Hume Cronyn's Freddie Potts might be something straight out of the early Booth Tarkington. Slim Robert Walker is wholly likable as the husband. June Allyson is a model little bride, especially when she sidles up to her man with an icebox tray in her hand and says with a happy sigh, "Our first ice cubes."

Blonde, petite, crinkly-eyed June Allyson, 22, has come up fast since she first arrived in Hollywood in September 1942. Probably Metro's most promising ingenue, she is the opposite of the typical young screen sparkler, looks and acts more like a well-adjusted schoolgirl from Pelham, N.Y.--which she is. Retiring, unflighty, even ungregarious, she lives quietly with her husband, reformed Crooner Dick Powell, 41, in a two-bedroom country house in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood. She cooks, takes art lessons, likes to read mystery stories, rarely makes the Hollywood nightclubs.

She comes by this small-townish, unstarlike domesticity without trying too hard. As a child she was badly injured by a falling tree branch, remained an invalid for about a year. She had to wear a corrective brace, was forced to become more or less stay-at-home and introspective. But at 14 she was well and worldly-wise enough to apply for a job in the chorus of the Broadway musical Sing Out the News, and pretty enough to get it. Singing and dancing for a couple of months, she returned to high school to graduate with high marks, went back to Broadway musicals and ultimately a Hollywood contract.

With personable implausibility, winsome Cinemactress Allyson now protests: "I never wanted to be an actress. I wanted to be a doctor." But after such pictures as Music for Millions, Two Girls and a Sailor, Her Highness and the Bellboy, and now Sailor, she seems reasonably content with her fate, her high place in fan-magazine popularity polls, her standing as a kind of female counterpart of Van Johnson, and her salary (about $750 a week). Her next picture: Two Sisters from Boston, as a sister to Singer Kathryn Grayson. Her modest ambition: to act like Margaret Sullavan.

The Diary of a Chambermaid (Benedict Boqeaus-United Artists) reveals no secrets. A toothsome 19th-Century chambermaid (Paulette Goddard) is employed by a wealthy French provincial family. Because of a scowling, scheming family butler (Francis Lederer), she gets into trouble. It is not the classic French chambermaid trouble, but it is bad enough; thereafter matters run to a violent, improbable conclusion.

An odd dish in most respects, Diary ought to have turned out much saltier and spicier than it is. As the picture stands, it has its lights and moments, especially those in which Co-Producer Burgess Meredith, playing the part of a crazy old soldier, hops & skips around chewing flowers and ogling Paulette (Mrs. Meredith). But most of the comedy dissipates into cloudy, dimly political Gallic melodrama, and the raffish promise of the title is never redeemed.

Sentimental Journey (20th Century-Fox), a soft-tremolo, full-quart weeper, should induce more snifflling and blubbering in the dark, more purse-fumbling and furtive eye-dabbing, than anything out of Hollywood since Marguerite Clark went to Heaven as Little Eva.

The sad, sad story: a childless young actress (Maureen O'Hara), married to a successful young producer (John Payne), takes in a little girl from an orphanage. Shortly thereafter she dies from a heart attack, leaving the weeping child to the care of the bereaved foster father. Then matters become totally lachrymose: the foster father does not want the child, but the child wants him. Even cheerful, extrovert William Bendix, knotting his Neanderthal brow, has a hard time making everybody stop crying.

In the end he succeeds, but not until there has been a deathbed scene, a graveyard watch, a near drowning. Stately Irish Cinemabeauty Maureen O'Hara, who recently has been required to do little more than look, bosomy in swashbuckling pictures, emotes heavily in chaste, flowing, decorous gowns.

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