The New Pictures

The Bride Goes Wild (MGM) is a title that goes begging for any conceivable meaning until the last reel. But those who put aside that negligible worry may have a rather good time at it.

Van Johnson is "Uncle Bumps," a writer of stories for children who loathes the little pests as wholeheartedly as he likes .liquor and girls. June Allyson, a somewhat prim (but non-bespectacled) Vermont schoolteacher, wins a contest to illustrate his forthcoming book, The Bashful Bull. When she meets Uncle Bumps, whom she has always idolized, he gets her drunk--a state which Miss Allyson communicates with more charm and taste than most movie stars of either sex. When she sobers, she is outraged. It is necessary to pretend that the genius is driven to drink by a delinquent son (Butch Jenkins), who is borrowed from an orphanage. And so on. Such busy plotting would barely skin by in a play for high-school amateurs, and everybody except Miss Allyson, who would probably put her whole heart into stuff even thinner, plays it in that slothful spirit. But the picture is good enough to pass an idle hour. It ambles from one easy, half-developed comic idea to another, with few serious dead spots between. Typical gags: Johnson and his publisher (Hume Cronyn) fouled up in an Indian war at the orphanage; the leapings and snatchings of respectable people at a small-town wedding, tormented by the ants which Butch has turned loose.

Audiences howl at such simplehearted reminders of the days when screen comedy was really crude and sometimes brilliant. If anyone could give them back the genuine thing, he might soon be the richest man in Hollywood.

The Pirate (M-G-M). Most movie musicals are made as if, at best, they were just "entertainment," and a pretty low grade of it at that. The Pirate is obviously made by people who know that few things in the world could be better, as entertainment and as a work of art, than a first-rate musical. Indeed, as an all-out try at artful moviemaking, this is among the most interesting pictures of the year. Unluckily, much of the considerable artistry that has gone into this production collides head-on with artiness, or is spoiled by simpler kinds of miscalculation.

Manuela (Judy Garland), engaged to a fat slob of a Caribbean mayor (Walter Slezak), is sure that a wandering mountebank (Gene Kelly) is the man of her daydreams, a pirate, legendary for dash and gallantry. Even when she learns that the actual pirate is the slob (retired), she sticks by the mountebank. When last seen, they're both clowning away to their hearts' content.

The movie extension of this S. N. Behrman play into a musical spectacle involves songs & lyrics by Cole Porter, dances designed by Gene Kelly and Robert Alton, and the direction of Miss Garland's husband, the gifted Vincente Minnelli (The Clock, etc.). The color--juicy oils and dark pastels, used with taste and intelligence--equals the best on movie record (Vanity Fair, Colonel Blimp, Henry V), and is the one unqualified triumph of the show. The composition and movement have Minnelli's Mediterranean sumptuousness. The tunes and lyrics are good grade-B Porter. Miss Garland's tense, ardent straightforwardness is sometimes very striking; and Gene Kelly does an arrestingly ambitious job. But Kelly's work is also a fair measure of the failure of this ambitious, highly stylized film.

He is a fine dancer, a good actor, personally very likable, of considerable vigor and sense as a creative artist, but on the whole he has gone very wrong in this picture. His performance is so sharply mannered that it is a continuous muted dance. But too little of the remarkable vitality and grace are really his own. He has drawn heavily on John Barrymore and still more heavily on Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and his imitations, almost the more because they are so apt and eager, are as unhappy to watch as any other forged masterpiece. Besides, he has to deliver a good deal of ornate language in his deep-city Irish-American diction, very good of itself, but inappropriate here. The total effect of the picture is "entertainment" troubled by delusions of "art," and vice versa. Comedy, whether high or low, is the quickest thing there is to perish under pretension.

Green Grass of Wyoming (20th Century-Fox). Thunderhead, son of My Friend Flicka (Thunderhead, Son of Flicka, 1945; My Friend Flicka, 1943), is a wild, spectacular white stallion who gallops magnificently from ranch to ranch scrounging beautiful young mares by the dozen and leading them off to his harem deep in the hills. In the current installment this beguiling libertine is transformed into as meek a monogamist as ever commuted from Westchester.

He eschews wild oats for the sake of Crown Jewel, a mare as beautifully black as he is white, and whinnies nervous encouragement as she trains for the trotting races. (P.S.: she does all right.) Left to their own devices, these glorious animals are a treat to watch. But too much time is wasted on relatively dull human beings: the Healthy Juvenile who owns Crown Jewel (Robert Arthur); his tomboy girl friend (Peggy Cummins, prettily poured into dungarees); her growling, boozy grandfather (a deadly conventional role all but redeemed by Charles Coburn's restraint); Burl Ives (singing a weird, savage ballad about two battling white stallions, which contrasts oddly with the picture's prevailing genteelism).

Two high points--Thunderhead's sensuous, rushing and wheeling courtship dance with the night-sleek Crown Jewel, and the heartbreaking, helpless panic of the two horses when the mare has foundered belly-deep in sucking mud--present unused possibilities of much greater suspense and excitement than the man-made climax of the trotting heats.

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