The New Pictures

Too Young to Kiss (MGM) starts inauspiciously by presenting Van Johnson as the stereotype of a famed concert impresario who reigns, suave and multilingual, over plush offices swarming with international artistes. But this bobby-soxer's S. Hurok quickly becomes the butt of a pleasant little comedy by the scripting team (Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett) of Father of the Bride.

Unable to get a hearing from the impresario, Pianist June Allyson schemes to catch his ear by crashing a children's audition as a 13-year-old, baring her dental braces in a demure smile. Johnson rises to the bait, rushes to her apartment the next morning with a fat contract guaranteeing a Manhattan debut. Posing as her own big sister, June tries to talk him into signing her up instead, but he scorns her as a selfish chiseler. At Johnson's insistence, 13-year-old June goes into training--teeth braces andall--at his country home.

June's masquerade leads to standard complications--the risks of exposure, the consternation of her fiance (Gig Young), the slow budding of love between the pianist and the impresario. But the pattern is neatly woven and filigreed with fun. Eager to truckle to his protegee's whims, Johnson flounders in backward child psychology and flinches under systematic torment by the overprecocious moppet. When he finds her smoking and gulping Scotch in an unguarded moment, she agrees to give up these peccadilloes, but only if he will forgo them too. She manages to squelch his romance with a French singer (Paula Corday), and when she turns his paternal good-night kiss into something more heated, she makes Johnson recoil with the stunned horror of a man discovering that, deep down, he is an all-too-willing fiend.

Actor Johnson rises brightly to the chance to display a light-comedy flair too often smothered by his material in the past. Actress Allyson's facile hands on the piano keyboard look surprisingly professional in a dubbed-in performance of Grieg's Piano Concerto in A Minor. And the film proves the perfect outlet for the little-girlishness that sometimes cloys in her grown-up roles.

Starlift (Warner) was Hollywood's ill-starred project of ferrying troupes of movie performers to Travis Air Base, north of San Francisco, to entertain replacements bound for Korea and wounded veterans on their way back to U.S. hospitals. That venture now supplies a backdrop for a spotty variety show, loosely glued together by the romance of a Hollywood star (Janice Rule) and an Air Force corporal (Ron Hagerthy) from her home town.

The film trots out Warner's full stable of stars--Doris Day, Ruth Roman, Gordon MacRae, Virginia Mayo, Gene Nelson, James Cagney, Gary Cooper, Phil Harris, Jane Wyman, Frank Lovejoy et al. But the show's best number is a hilarious skit, "How to Bake a Pousse-Cafe Cake," performed by the nightclub team of Noonan & Marshall.

The movie comes a cropper when it tries for comedy under its own power, and when it exploits a wardful of wounded veterans to raise a lump in the throat, it raises only a gorge. But Starlift is guilty of its worst breach of good taste when it takes a low bow for Hollywood's patriotic gesture, makes the project seem exclusively Warner's, includes in its cast some stars who never troubled to fly up to Travis Air Base. And the $1,000,000 Starlift is entering U.S. theaters just a month after Hollywood's Operation Starlift shut down, after running out of the $5,000 that Hollywood chipped in for its expenses.

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