The New Pictures

The Kissing Bandit (MGM) pokes some good-humored fun at the buskin-and-bluster heroes of costume melodrama. The picture itself is only a costume piece, with a little vaudeville thrown in. Its best features are the broad comedy by J. Carroll Naish, the sentimental songs sung by Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson, and some lively Spanish dances.

The story is about what you would expect in a second-rate comic opera. A proper Bostonian (Sinatra) arrives in Spanish-owned California to take over an inn and a gang of bandits inherited from his father. The rootin'-tootin' father had been bored with innkeeping, but he was a great hand at banditry and kissing the women he robbed. The son is a shaky beanpole who falls off his horse at the drop of a hoof. He is afraid of guns and women, but anxious to see that the inn has plenty of clean sheets and towels.

Producer Joe Pasternak was wise enough not to ride this little gag too hard. He has allowed time for enough moon-spoon-swoon songs to please the most ardent Sinatra fans. Kathryn Grayson occasionally joins in, and gives the love lyrics a wholesome quality of antiseptic passion.

As Chico, head of the working bandits, J. Carroll Naish does a fine eye-rolling caricature of the stock "Mexican general." He is greased-up, bulb-nosed, and hidden by eyebrows and mustache heavy enough to make a hair shirt. The dancers (Ricardo Montalban, Sono Osato, Ann Miller, Cyd Charisse) are easy to watch. The Technicolor makes the white horses and blue skies look wonderful, and most of the actors feverish.

When My Baby Smiles at Me (20th Century-Fox) is a watered-down version of the durable stage hit Burlesque.* The old plot is still there, but the characters have been tidied up. The play treated burlesque as a pretty tough part of show business. In the movie, it is just more of the same old backstage life where actors occasionally misplace a pronoun.

In some recent pictures, Betty Grable fans have had a hard time finding their girl beneath the ermine and the bustles. In this one, she appears in tights, slit skirts, and other examples of sensible Grable costume. Fortunately, the camera provides all the customers with seats well down front, just below the runway.

As Skid, Grable's alcoholic husband, Dan Dailey is an engaging dancing partner. The moral seems to be: forced to choose between booze and Grable, what man would be fool enough to want to drink?

Rogues' Regiment (Universal-International) revives the reliable old French Foreign Legion and throws in a few renegade Nazis for good measure. It seems that a sinister character known as Carl Reicher (Stephen McNally) disappeared from Nazi circles at the time Hitler died. Hot on his trail is a handsome, fearless U.S. intelligence officer (Dick Powell) whose spy contact in Saigon is a sultry nightclub singer (Marta Toren). The comic strips could take it from there.

Military spies, according to Rogues' Regiment, are a pretty simple-minded lot. The Legion at Saigon is heroically engaged in beating up some native revolutionists (they appear to want something to eat, or a vote, or some other non-military objective). When the slinky girl spy copies a secret map, the Legionnaires study it and then stoutly march straight into an ambush--exactly where it was marked on the map. The only thing Sleuth Powell needs to make him more conspicuous when he is out snooping at night is a neon sign on his chest.

* First produced on Broadway in 1927, with Barbara Stanwyck and Hal Skelly, revived in 1946, with Jean Parker and Bert Lahr.

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