The New Pictures

Lovely to Look At (M-G-M), a remake of the old Broadway musical Roberta (filmed in 1935 with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) is delightful to listen to because of such Jerome Kern songs as Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, I Won't Dance and the title tune. The picture is also pleasant to look at with a 15-minute fashion finale featuring startling Adrian creations in Technicolor.

Unfortunately, the screenplay is not quite so chic. Red Skelton inherits a half interest in a Paris dress salon and stages a musical fashion show on the premises. Howard Keel sings and has romantic designs on Designer Kathryn Grayson; Ann Miller and Marge and Gower Champion do some fast stepping, and blonde Zsa Zsa Gabor just flounces around. When it is dressed up with songs and smart styles, Lovely to Look At has a champagne sparkle. At other times, it is as flat as dead soda pop.

The Fighter (Alex Gottlieb; United Artists) is a fairly flabby film version of Jack London's 1911 story, The Mexican, about a peon who stands up under a brutal beating in an American prize ring so that he can buy guns for the Mexican revolution with the winner-take-all purse.

The picture embellishes the London story with a long, sleepy flashback and some syrupy romantic interest (Vanessa Brown). As a Mexican guerrilla, Lee Cobb gives an intense performance, while Richard Conte is impassioned but too dashing as the peon. In spite of a vigorously photographed ring climax, The Fighter packs little dramatic punch.

About Face (Warner) adds lustrous Technicolor and several lackluster songs & dances to the old stage (1936) and screen (1938) farce, Brother Rat. There are some strictly unmilitary goings-on at Southern Military Institute. Against Institute regulations, Cadet Eddie Bracken is secretly married to Phyllis Kirk, who is about to become a mother; Cadet Dick Wesson does not know that Betty Short (Virginia Gibson) is really Betty Long, daughter of the new commandant; Cadet Gordon MacRae sings such songs as Spring Has Sprung, and spikes an unpleasant chemistry instructor's hair tonic with green and blue dyes. A lot of gay, enthusiastic young people labor strenuously to make this an enjoyable military musical, but About Face suffers from command indecision.

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