The New Pictures

Where's Charley? (Warner) adds tunes, Technicolor and limber-legged Ray Bolger to that durable old 1892 romp, Charley's Aunt, to make a merry cinemusical. As Oxford Undergraduate Charley,* Bolger sings & dances in his ingratiatingly gawky style. And to get himself and his pal out of a romantic dilemma, he also impersonates Dona Lucia d'Alvadorez, his rich aunt from Brazil, "where all the nuts come from." Decked out in a long black dress and a red wig, "with a face like a hatchet, a voice like a duck and a figure to match," Bolger makes a highly amusing if improbable lady--something like a cross between Whistler's Mother and the late Edna Mae Oliver.

Where's Charley? dresses up its pratfall plot with actual Oxford settings, such pleasant songs as My Darling, My Darling, and a flashy Brazilian dance number in which Bolger imagines he is a dashing Spanish don. Besides Dancer Bolger, the picture borrows three other leading players from the 1948 Broadway musicomedy Where's Charley?, on which it is based: Allyn McLerie as Charley's comically deadpan girl friend; Horace Cooper as her fiercely mustachioed, fortune-hunting Uncle Spettigue, who woos Charley's aunt in a series of galloping Mack Sennett chases; and Robert Shackleton as Charley's singing roommate.

Scarlet Angel (Universal-International) is the name of a gaudy post-Civil War saloon in New Orleans, "where the whisky is watered and the gambling is as crooked as the gals." Here, sultry Roxy (Yvonne de Carlo) plies her trade as hostess, separating the customers from their cash, calling everybody "dearie," and enthusiastically participating in all the barroom brawls.

Then, one Technicolored day, in walks Rock Hudson, a handsome merchant skipper. The Scarlet Angel's boss whispers to Yvonne: "He flashed a bankroll that could choke you." Replies Yvonne: "That's a pleasant way to be strangled."

Before long, Yvonne has wound up in San Francisco with Hudson's cash, and is palming herself off as the war widow of the scion of a wealthy Nob Hill family. But she is not really happy. "All of a sudden," she admits, "I've got everything I want, but I don't want anything I've got." She is also smarting under a crack made to her by Hudson: "Money can't do everything, Roxy. There's a certain thing called class, and you haven't got it."

So Yvonne sets about casting off her saloon background in favor of class. She keeps her pinkie raised when holding a teacup, and moves about in circles where the talk runs to such refined remarks as, "May I escort you to the punch bowl?" She also undergoes a moral reformation. She turns up her nose at a life of luxury by spurning two handsome, wealthy suitors, and runs off instead with poor but honest Seaman Hudson, who has followed her to San Francisco. By the fadeout, Yvonne has obviously acquired class. Unfortunately, Scarlet Angel never does.

Three for Bedroom C (Brenco; Warner) is a sluggish farce set on a fast transcontinental train. On board are a high-powered Hollywood glamour queen (Gloria Swanson) and a handsome Harvard biochemistry professor named Oliphant J. Thrumm. Before the train is well under way, the actress and the professor (James Warren) find that they are doing things to each other's chemistry.

In her first appearance since 1950's Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson seems to be giving a devastating imitation of herself in that picture, including lacquered profile, smoked glasses, fluttering eyelashes and grande dame mannerisms.

* Other screen Charleys: Syd Chaplin (1925), Jack Benny (1941).

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