The New Pictures

The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend {20th Century-Fox} is a wild-eyed jamboree starring Betty Grable and co-starring the explosive, uneven talents of Writer-Director-Producer Preston Sturges (The Miracle of Morgan's Creek). The show is a running battle between sex and slapstick, which to most right-minded Grable fans will seem an impertinent piece of lese majesty.

The slapstick, gotten up as an elaborate spoof of Hollywood westerns, quickly gets out of hand. So does Grable. As a pistol-packing hussy in bustles, Betty takes a potshot at her wayward boy friend (Cesar Romero), nicks instead the wrong end of the local judge. While wriggling out of a jail sentence, she again flies off the handle, again dents the judge in the rear. In the last reel she does it a third time.

Repetition, in fact, is Director Sturges' specialty. Some of his gags, even the most familiar ones, are run through the camera four or five times in rapid succession, giving the effect of a bad attack of hiccoughs, or a worn record turning in the same groove. To keep the gags rolling, he deploys a whole passel of comics, including Rudy Vallee, with pince-nez and purse-mouthed antics, Hugh Herbert as a butter-fingered doctor, and a couple of yowling hillbilly pinheads (Sterling Holloway and Danny Jackson). None of them is as funny as they were plainly meant to be.

In trying to tinker with the Grable formula, Director Sturges comes perilously close to forgetting the Grable form. Betty sings only a couple of songs, gets no chance to dance at all, and gives only two rather fleeting leg shows, once in an old-fashioned Pullman berth and again in the midst of a gunfight. A Sturges experiment is always worth watching, but most moviegoers would probably have settled for more Grable and fewer gags.

It Happens Every Spring [20th-Century-Fox] is the kind of thing that happens only in the mind of a hard-pressed Hollywood gag writer. The gag is acted out by Ray Milland, a serious young chemistry instructor at a Midwest university who is also a serious baseball fan. One day, puttering with mysterious solutions in his laboratory, Milland accidentally hits upon a liquid mixture that repels wood. It takes the low-salaried chemist just a second longer than it takes he audience to see the possibilities of his wonderful compound. When the idea dawns, he skips out on his college sweeheart (Jean Peters), packs a couple of bottles of his tricky formula, and rushes off to St. Louis to make his fame & fortune on the baseball diamond.

Making baseball history is a cinch with the help of a moist pad concealed in the hollow of his pitcher's mitt. Every time his wood-repellent ball comes steaming across the plate, it takes a neat little hop over the advancing bat. In no time, Miland is the star pitcher in a heated World Series. Everything, in fact, is going fine until his roommate and catcher (Paul Douglas) starts using the precious solution as a hair tonic. This leads to some minor plot complications and further belaboring of the film's one gag, which has already been worn down to a small nubbin.

With remarkable skill, this single-cylinder fantasy has somehow been kept in motion by Director Lloyd Bacon (Mother-Is a Freshman) and Writer Valentine Davies (Miracle on 34th Street), who apparently have a gift for making a fairly funny movie out of a downright silly idea. Even so, without the sly comedy sense of Veteran Milland and the pug-faced antics of Paul Douglas, Every Spring could easily have struck out in the second reel.

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