New Picture

The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (RKO Radio) is a farcical love story with some genuinely new angles, some of them genuinely amusing. When Bobby-Soxer Shirley Temple falls head over socks for Bachelor Gary Grant, she invades his lair so compromisingly that he is jailed. But Shirley's big sister Myrna Loy, a judge, hands out a light penalty: he only has to squire the child around until her infatuation wears off.

As it turns out, the sentence is not so light after all. He is hauled about, willy-nilly, among her eager little friends, embarrassed by her embittered swain (Johnny Sands), and teased at every turn by Miss Loy's insufferably smug lover, Rudy Vallee. Worse still, of course, he falls for the judge. Good fun: Grant and Vallee competing grimly before their ladyloves in sack races, three-legged races and such other corruptions of sport as picnics are apt to inspire.

The picture leans a little too much on strained circumstance and unmitigated whimsy, but it has its moments. Shirley, in her climaxes of calf love, sees her hero in shining armor, putting on his helmet exactly as if it were a snap brim. Writer Sidney Sheldon has inserted a bit of adolescent dizzy-dialectic* that might even become epidemic. And the whole cast, notably Mr. Vallee, is obviously having a fine "time. So will most people, for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer is good summer-weight comedy.

* A: "You remind me of a man." B: "What man?" A: "The man with the power." B: "What power?" A: "The power of who-do." B: "Who-do?" A: "You do!" B: "Do what?" A: "Remind me of a man." B: "What man?" . . . And so on, ad infinitum.

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