The New Pictures

Ask Any Girl (Euterpe; MGM) is an exuberantly snappy story of what happens when the ancient art of love is improved by the juvenile science of motivational research.

The heroine (Shirley MacLaine) is a girl from Wilkes-Barre, Pa. who arrives in Manhattan in a condition of innocence she wishes she could cure. A number of big-city leeches hasten to prescribe, but Shirley is an old-fashioned girl who declines to undergo some sorts of physiotherapy. When a Seventh Avenue smoothie (Rod Taylor) offers "to do you a favor and develop you emotionally," Shirley hauls off and hangs a mouse on him. When her boss at Kampus Knits, a sweater company, attempts to handle some merchandise that she happens to be wearing, Shirley quits.

She soon gets a more peaceful job: smoking cigarettes. Her employer (David Niven) is a motivational researcher with a cigarette account and a younger brother (Gig Young) who looks "like a Greek god." Unfortunately, the brother is not interested in Shirley. But Shirley has a bright idea: Why not use M.R. to find out exactly what the consumer wants?

Niven takes up the challenge, makes off with his brother's address book, does some exhaustive research "in the field," compiles an encyclopedia of seduction. Shirley assiduously studies it and then gives the man what he seems to want: Evelyn's eyebrows, Katherine's kisses, Penelope's perfume, Winifred's wiggle. "Hit below the level of his awareness," the consumer of course crumbles. Conclusion: Shirley MacLaine is an extraordinarily funny girl.

She has the face of an idealized Raggedy Ann, the body of a chorus girl, the deadeyed, wag-jawed delivery of a ventriloquist's dummy, and she probably pos sesses beauty, talent and mass appeal in greater degree than any cinema comedienne since Carole Lombard. In recent films (Hot Spell, Some Came Running) her somewhat monotonous manner has developed into a supple and imaginative comic style. In Ask Any Girl she practices for the first time a sort of I'm-a-grown-up-girl-now decorum and restraint, so that when at last she does bust loose, the lulled spectator jumps as if a sleeping hose had suddenly come alive and spluttering.

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