The New Pictures

Fancy Pants (Paramount) bills its star as "Mr. Robert Hope (formerly Bob)" and interrupts its opening credits with his disdainful appearance as a 19th Century English dandy. Says Mr. Hope to the audience with a sneer: "No popcorn during my performance, peasants."

This turns out to be the high point of a slapdash Technicolored farce that should try the patience of all but the most ardent Hope fans. The film is a cluttered catchall of mossy gags, pratfalls and comedy routines dating back to Mack Sennett and before. Hope is still the fumbling poltroon, this time a ham actor who masquerades as a gentleman's gentleman in England, then becomes a real valet masquerading in the Wild West as a British earl. He caricatures snobbery and braggadocio, unfailingly spills tea trays all over an English hostess, unwittingly courts death at the hands of a cowboy villain (Bruce Cabot) and becomes the prey of a pack of mongrels drafted for a sagebrush foxhunt.

Bits & pieces of the comedy are pretty funny; they always have been. But they are too widely scattered, and often too forced, to give Fancy Pants pace and consistency. Before it is over, Hope is attacking his material with the frantic determination of an untested comic who has begun to notice a certain restlessness in the audience. The result is not guaranteed to keep the peasants from reaching for the popcorn.

Stella (20th Century-Fox), based on Novelist Doris Miles Disney's* story of a raffish family's efforts to hornswoggle an insurance company out of $20,000 in death benefits, gives Actor David Wayne his first chance to cut loose with the comic talent he displayed in Broadway's Finian's Rainbow and Mister Roberts. With his help, Writer-Director Claude Binyon squeezes enough chuckles out of a series of corpses to make up for a romantic subplot that is dead on its feet.

Happily cast as a ghoulish small-town scamp, Wayne accidentally kills his unpopular Uncle Joe on a family picnic and, fearing a murder charge, talks the family into burying him secretly near by. When he learns that the dead man carried a $10,000 life insurance policy (double indemnity for accidents), he hopefully begins identifying a random lot of corpses as Uncle Joe. Twice balked by insurance investigators, once in the midst of a mock-solemn funeral service full of twittering canaries, Wayne finally decides to dig up Uncle Joe and put him where he can do some good.

No Arsenic and Old Lace, the picture manages nevertheless to make its irreverence amusing while generally clearing the hurdles of poor taste. It trips only when it tries to be conventional, i.e., with a love triangle in which Victor Mature, as a claims investigator, and local Insurance Agent Leif Erickson compete for the affections of Stella (Ann Sheridan), the family breadwinner, who is horrified by the schemes hatched by her ne'er-do-well relatives. As the kind of simple-shrewd, irresponsible character he plays best, Wayne is really the star of the movie, and he gets fine support from Frank Fontaine, who plays his dull-witted sidekick, and Evelyn Varden, his conscience-stricken mother-in-law.

Beaver Valley (Walt Disney; RKO Radio) is the second in the series of short Technicolored nature documentaries that Walt Disney launched in 1948 with his Oscar-winning Seal Island. Photographed with enormous patience and resourcefulness by Cameraman Alfred G. Milotte, and put together with the sprightly humor of a Disney cartoon, it is an intimate record of wild life in & around a beaver pond in the Rockies.

Some 20 wild creatures, from the crayfish to the moose, are caught in unguarded moments during each of the four seasons of the year. The camera looks aloft to watch hawks exchanging a dead mouse in midair, and under water to see weary salmon returning to their spawning beds. A young beaver goes off on his own, sets up housekeeping with a widow and her baby beaver and builds a dam for the family. A skulking coyote preys on the well-camouflaged heron and bittern and the nimble marmot and badger.

Skillful editing, scoring and commentary combine to humanize the animals almost as if they sprang from the Disney drawing board, and produce an engaging little story in which Hero Beaver and his friends outwit Villain Coyote while some frivolous otters and baby ducks supply the comic relief. Paul Smith's score is a miracle of synchronization and humorous comment. The film's piece de resistance: the frogs and crickets croaking and chirping through a chorus of the sextet from Lucia. Well worth sitting through a dull feature for, Beaver Valley is both an informative nature study and a delightful example of moviemaking magic.

*No kin to Walt Disney.

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