Anything for Laughs

To balance last year's heavy movie diet of psychotics, disillusioned soldiers, mistreated Negroes and megalomaniac athletes, Hollywood is currently dishing up a series of bland drawing-room comedies. Mostly these harmless romps seem to have no more serious aim than to give tired moviegoers a chance to watch elegantly dressed people wasting time and money.

And Baby Makes Three (Columbia) drives Robert Young and Barbara Hale to some witless and feverish activity over prospective parenthood. The opening shots, in which a pregnant bride faints at the altar, are something of a novelty. After that, the movie works furiously to overcome its initial breach of Hollywood convention. Some faint sparkle radiates from the racy photography, Robert Young's owl-like pantomime and Robert Hutton's cagey portrayal of a sissified rich boy. But the picture gets its most memorable effects from a series of stylish cocktail-hour gowns.

Tell It to the Judge (Columbia) is marital slapstick in which Robert Cummings pursues Rosalind Russell from Florida to the Adirondacks. In the best woman's magazine tradition, it depicts the U.S. male as a kitten and the female as a hyperthyroid tiger. Attorney Russell, as stalwart as the bottom man in a tumbling act, is efficient at everything, while Lawyer Cummings gets knocked out twice (once by Rosalind), skis on his face, wears a kimono and does the cooking. Typical scene: Cummings skittishly trying to sleep alongside a wet Saint Bernard.

The Lady Takes a Sailor (Warner) pursues its laughs with the single-mindedness of a determined practical joker. A low-comedy farce about sedate professional people, it douses the characters with paint, runs them down with trick automobiles, and sticks them with pitchforks. The plot maneuvers Jane Wyman, director of a consumers' research institute, into Dennis Morgan's top-secret navy sea tractor. Jane's reputation in her job depends on proving that she was actually underseas with Morgan, Morgan's on suppressing the film she shot in his craft. Most of the gags are pretty thin, e.g., a safecracker trying to open a sardine can and a lady who has lost her left shoe trying to cross a hotel lobby. But chiefly, the slapstick potboiler is saved by unpretentious acting and the leisurely direction of Michael Curtiz.

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