The New Pictures

Family Honeymoon (Universal-International) devotes itself strenuously to the leering old gag of setting up an obstacle course between the nuptial bed and a pair of ardent newly weds (Claudette Colbert and Fred MacMurray). Among the obstacles: the Other Woman (Rita Johnson), the rigors of a tour through the Grand Canyon, the constant company of the bride's three small children by a former marriage.

Despite a few mild laughs, the gag stretches thin during the 90 minutes it takes to get the harried honeymooners to bed. Whatever novelty the script suggests in turning a wedding trip into a family excursion is lost in the exhausted atmosphere of marital misunderstanding and reconciliation.

The most familiar thing about this picture is its stars, who may have put in too many years as models of romantic discomfiture. The film's manufacturers readily admit this possibility by allowing a bobby-soxer to surrender a park bench to Miss Colbert and Mr. MacMurray with the remark: "Imagine an old couple like that looking for a place to smooch!"

Flaxy Martin (Warner) is a chain reaction of horror and violence. A gullible young lawyer (Zachary Scott) is in love with a double-crossing blonde (Virginia Mayo). He imagines that she is going to help him break away from his job as legal chore boy for a gang of hoodlums; instead, she helps frame him for murder. When he manages to escape from the guard who is carting him off to prison, the gang's trigger man catches up with him. This leads to the most gruesome of the movie's assortment of gruesome scenes: Scott and the kindhearted girl (Dorothy Malone) who has hidden him are parked on a lonely roadside while a gangster cheerfully digs a grave to dump them in. A gentler touch: Scott shoving a gunman over the edge of a building. Flaxy Martin is not the wickedest of Warner's gangster sagas, but its leading lady sets some kind of a record for doing dirt to her men. If she is no better than she should be, neither is the picture.

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