The New Pictures

A Woman of Distinction (Columbia) tries hard to humanize higher education with repeated injections of low comedy. Ray Milland, a lecture-touring British astronomer, falls in love with Bluestocking Rosalind Russell, a dean of women who has, for no specific reason, just been pictured on TIME'S cover. All that prevents their speedy marriage, and a quick ending to the picture, is her unmotivated conviction that there is no room in her life for romance.

To spin out this tedious plot, Director Edward Buzzell relies heavily on slapstick. Rosalind is trapped in the slats of a Venetian blind, -spanked by an exploding engine part in a hot-rod race, nearly strangled in an electric fan. Ray Milland has to work for his laughs by falling off a by-cycle, getting pushed into a river and being slugged with a handbag. The low ,comedy touches bottom in a tasteless love scene between Rosalind and a callow schoolboy (Jerome Courtland).

A Woman of Distinction is based on the firmly-held Hollywood notion that higher education is a joke. The students are portrayed as morons, their teachers as nincompoops. Viewed as a Punch & Judy show, it has some funny moments. As a movie, it wastes the talents of a capable cast, including Edmund Gwenn and Francis Lederer.

Perfect Strangers (Warner) dramatizes an idea that would appeal to a Hungarian playwright, and once did. Originally a play by L. Bush-Fekete, later adapted for Broadway by Ben Hecht and Charles

Mac Arthur (1 939-3 Ladies and Gentlemen), the movie version is still full of tricks and trifles. It strikes up a guilty romance between two jurors, both married, while they are trying an unfaithful husband accused of murdering his wife. Meanwhile, the rest of the jury--a casting director's dream of variety--illustrates the foibles and prejudices of ordinary citizens who are asked to sit in judgment.

The love story, involving Ginger Rogers and Dennis Morgan, is so hazily motivated and awkwardly resolved that it gives the two stars the picture's most thankless roles. Juror Rogers' own wayward emotions make her identify herself with the defendant's girl friend, and help her to bring three recalcitrant jurors around to a verdict of not guilty. But once the trial is over, it develops that both she and Morgan are too true blue to carry their romance beyond the jury room.

Though its jury deliberations hardly inspire confidence in the U.S. judicial system, Perfect Strangers begins with a fairly interesting documentary sequence on how jurors are picked. The picture gains most fopm some simple character humor in the incidental byplay of well-assorted stock types on its jury: Thelma Ritter as a lowbrow housewife, Anthony Ross as a wolf, Frank Conlan as a poker player who thinks out loud. Howard Freeman and Margalo Gillmore do well in unsympathetic roles as a prissy bluenose and a cattymatron. Unfortunately, the film, as a whole is not equal to the sum of its small parts.

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