The New Pictures

Let's Dance (Paramount) teams Fred Astaire with Betty Hutton in a talky musicomedy that takes its plot too seriously and its stars' special talents too lightly. As a war widow fighting her husband's stuffy family for custody of her son, Singer Hutton takes refuge in a nightclub and renews an old romance with Hoofer Astaire. Boy loses girl not once but twice, the child is seized or kidnaped three times, and the story is cluttered with what seems to be all the supporting players on the Paramount lot.

No one should be surprised to find Actress Hutton a match for Astaire in vitality, but she also proves adept at dogging his dancing steps in their single full-blown number together. On her own, she gets a chance to hurtle through some galvanic shenanigans, practically no chance to show her more impressive ability as an actress. Astaire's feet seem more facile than ever. In one solo he does a delightful ballet version of Jack and the Beanstalk while singing a bright lyric by Frank Loesser. In both he is nimble and ingenious enough to stop the show. Unfortunately, the show goes right on.

American Guerrilla in the Philippines (20th Century-Fox) muffs a promising chance to do justice to an authentic saga of World War II. The movie was filmed in the Philippines, so that even a fictional treatment might have preserved a semi-documentary tang. Instead, taken either as fiction or reportage, the picture turns out to be as counterfeit and hackneyed as a comic-book adventure yarn, and not nearly so well paced.

As written by Scripter-Producer Lamar Trotti and played by Tyrone Power, the PT-boat officer who becomes a major of guerrillas is a stock movie hero. He is equipped with a comic sidekick from Pocatello (Tom Ewell), a Tommy gun that never needs reloading, a romance that blossoms in warmest Technicolor during interludes of song & dance. The book's love story has been revamped and overblown: its Spanish heroine (now French, presumably to accommodate the studio's contract with France's Micheline Prelle) is married to a wealthy Filipino planter but conveniently widowed in plenty of time to get ardent comfort from Hero Power.

Though it is fleetingly faithful to some ingenious details of guerrilla operations, the picture plays fast & loose with military history. Veterans of the Pacific war may be anachronistically edified, if somewhat surprised, to hear American Guerrilla's naval officers speaking of General Douglas MacArthur with something close to veneration. They also may be heartened to learn that the Leyte landings were as simple as a walk-on. In the film's climax, the rumble of distant naval guns disperses a Japanese patrol that is closing in on the guerrillas. "MacArthur?" asks Micheline. "He said he'd return," replies Tyrone. Moments later, led by G.I. columns stepping briskly to a Sousa march, the jeep-borne general himself (played by Robert Barrat) rolls into sight to accept their cheers.

Jackpot (20th Century-Fox) light-heartedly examines one of the minor problems of U.S. life: what happens when a man wins $24,000 in prizes on a radio giveaway show. Until his "lucky" night, James Stewart is a happily married junior executive in a small-town department store. His only infidelity to his wife (Barbara Hale) and two un-Hollywooden children (Natalie Wood and Tommy Rettig) has been an occasional daydream about getting away from it all and taking a trip to the North Pole.

Then he hits the jackpot. As his front lawn is piled high with cartons of soup, dressed beef, a grand piano, fruit trees and ponies, as a feline portrait painter (Patricia Medina) and a lacy interior decorator (Alan Mowbray) move in on him, Stewart plunges into a glassy-eyed nightmare that costs him his job, threatens his marriage, gets him clapped into jail.

The movie is based on a sardonic New Yorker article by John McNulty, but Scripters Phoebe and Henry Ephron seem to have leaned more heavily on the comic strip Blondie for their family sequences, and on Damon Runyan for an episode with a Chicago gangster. Director Walter Lang helps out the dialogue with pratfalls and horseplay, but what keeps Jackpot moving briskly to its happy ending is the ingratiating acting of Jimmy Stewart.

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