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No Leave, No Love (MGM) is a very cheap picture on which no expense was spared. It is a lesson in how to mix a salad that will look attractive to the biggest possible mass audience.

First, take a top, sure-fire star (Van Johnson). Add a pretty girl who can sing (Pat Kirkwood). Throw in a skilled comic (Keenan Wynn) and a couple of "name" orchestras (Guy Lombardo and Xavier Cugat). Never mind the plot. Van Johnson, looking winsome for the better part of two hours, is all the romance his bobby-sox worshipers really want. Wynn can handle the laughs.

This conscious effort to please the bottom level of U.S. audience intelligence is made with assurance and .great technical competence. The result is so relaxing to eye, ear and brain that millions of moviegoers will not know that they are suffering a carefully studied insult.

The one bright feature of No Leave, No Love: a too-brief specialty act by Frank ("Sugar Chile") Robinson. This remarkable, seven-year-old, 50-lb. Negro prodigy sings and plays boogie-woogie piano with his soul, eyes, fingers, fists and elbows.

Deception (Warner) has a plot that might have made a howling good farce--if it had been played for laughs. Bette Davis is a young pianist, reunited after six years with the great love of her life. Cellist Paul Henreid. While Henreid has been missing in wartime Europe, Bette has been studying life, as well as counterpoint, with famous Composer Claude Rains. But Henreid must never, never know. He must be convinced, in spite of crushing evidence to the contrary, that Bette's antique-furnished penthouse is being paid for with the proceeds of her music teaching.

In the modern, stylishly bohemian society in which it is set, this naughty old story (from Louis Verneuil's moth-eaten play, Jealousy, recently revived on Broadway as Obsession) seems doubly ridiculous. It is impossible to believe that 1) Bette would try to conceal her past, or 2) Henreid could be deceived for a minute.

In her sinful screen career, Miss Davis has played many a fetching, high-tragedy bad girl; in Deception she is merely a hysterical bad liar. Hero Henreid is an unlovable, nitwitted neurotic. Claude Rains, as the hammy composer who keeps telling Bette off, is cast as the villain but, by default, he wins the audience's wholehearted admiration and sympathy.

Johnny Frenchman (J. Arthur Rank-Universal) explores a novel and fascinating locale: a Cornish fishing village and its Breton counterpart across the Channel. The picture also preaches a worthy moral: "People of good will are pretty much the same, no matter what language they speak."

The documentary details of British and French village life--the seining, fishing, pubbing, etc.--are shrewdly observed and handsomely photographed. The backgrounds and bit-players are so excellent, in fact, that the routine Montague-Capulet romance is an intrusion. With the exception of Franchise Rosay, famed French cinemactress (Carnival in Flanders, Portrait of a Woman) whose histrionics are not quite so subtle when she speaks her lines in English, the principal people in this film are less interesting than the fish.

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