The New Comedies

Make Mine Mink (Rank; Continental). Terry-Thomas is a minor British comedian with a mouth like a disappointed mail slot, gaunt but somehow flaccid cheeks, cavernous eye sockets containing soggy blue objects that look as if they had sat all night in a glass of water, self-energizing mustaches, and a gap between his two front teeth that has earned him a reputation in English restaurants as a man who can eat peas with his teeth clenched. He has mastered the wax-fruity manner of the pushy little pip-pipsqueak, up from dreary digs, who would dearly love to be accepted as an old-school-tiehard, but inevitably smacks more of the pub than the club; and since the war he has done an admirable succession of non-U turns as a sort of half-inflated Blimp.

Now at last Terry-Thomas is rewarded with a starring role in a suitably dotty but amiable bit of British nonsense, and he carries it off with his usual weedy charm and blithering idiocy. He is cast as a retired major who shares a flat in Kensington with three maiden ladies (Athene Seyler, Elspeth Duxbury, Hattie Jacques) while together they subside regretfully into "the teatime of life." What to do with themselves? Suddenly one of the dear old things has an inspiration that could lend vast new dimensions to the science of geriatrics: Why not organize a crime syndicate and devote the profits to a Worthy Cause? "Splendid!" cries the major, and in absurdly elaborate military detail he proceeds to plan an assault on the gang's first objective, a fur shop. Naturally, everything that can possibly go wrong goes as wrong as possible, but somehow the charitable criminals manage to creak home with half their haul--the other half is absentmindedly left in a taxi. Stumbling and bumbling from success to hilarious success, the mink mob is soon established as the despair of Scotland Yard and the hope of innumerable philanthropies--including the police orphanage. At the fade, four suspicious characters, dressed in the Renaissance knickers worn by guards in the Tower of London, can be seen slouching purposefully toward the Crown Jewels.

"I say!" says Terry-Thomas as he spots his glittering objective. "Jolly good show!" It is indeed.

The Grass is Greener (Grandon; Universal), as a London play, was a champagne comedy pressed from one of Britain's choicest sour grapes: those beastly aggressive, filthy rich Americans. Such regional decoctions ordinarily do not travel well, but this one is conveyed to the U.S. public by Gary Grant, who could pour the stuff in a hair net, cross the North Atlantic in a rowboat during a polar gale, and never lose a bubble.

Grant plays a British earl who has opened his stately home to public visitation at half a crown a head. "An Englishman's home," his wife (Deborah Kerr) observes cheerily, "is not only his castle.

It's his income." But sometimes she finds it all a dreadful bore: living in a museum, knocking about in county tweeds, keeping the upper lip stiff as she rakes a fresh batch of manure into those horrid little mushrooms in the cellar.

In short, milady is ruddy well ready for a bit of fun when an American oillionaire (Robert Mitchum) plonks himself into her roped-off living room and informs her that she has "very lovely eyes." Intrigued, she lets him go sofa and no farther. But a week later in London they consummate an entirely satisfactory international relationship. Meanwhile, back at the castle, her husband gets wind of what has happened. "Adultery," he announces firmly, "is not sufficient grounds for divorce. I want her back." It takes him an hour of screen time to get her back, and that hour contains the silliest duel of the cinema season and some of its nuttier repartee. In patches, Grass needs some determined cutting, but whenever the script lapses, Director Stanley Donen (Indiscreet) is right there with a cute shot. And the actors--with the lamentable exception of Mitchum, who does not seem to realize that the best way to play a cartoon American is simply to play himself--rescue scene after scene with a deft cliche of gesture or a delightful bit of business. Actress Kerr is milady to the Cambridge quaver. Jean Simmons, a wildly inspired comedienne (Guys and Dolls), plays a society playgirl so dumb she "can't play Scrabble with grown-up people"--but is she ever a whiz when it comes to adding money and subtracting husbands.

Actor Grant, as usual, is the mainstay of the show. He is the only funnyman in movie history who has maintained himself for close to 30 years as a ranking romantic star. He wears only one expression: the bland mask of drawing-room comedy. He plays only one part: the well-pressed, elegantly laundered masculine existence that suddenly finds itself splashed by love's old sweet ketchup. About that situation Grant has nothing important to say, no social or moral message to deliver. He creates in a vacuum of values; he is a technician only--but he is a technician of genius.

A Breath of Scandal (Paramount). "Didn't your father inherit part of Poland?" "Mmm. Lost it at Monte Carlo." "Never mind. I hear it wasn't the best part." Olympia, the palace farce by Ferenc Molnar on which this film is based, was loaded with that sort of charmingly phony antechamber chatter -- Molnar liked to write as though he got it straight from the Habsburg lip. Unhappily, Breath of Scandal has inherited only a small part (and not necessarily the best part) of Molnar's small talk while retaining the only elements of his silly little operetta plot. In the picture, Habsburg princess (Sophia Loren) meets Pittsburgh peasant (John Gavin) instead of hussar. Anyhow, the color is peachy-keen and the sets are magnificent ; Scandal was shot on location in five Austrian palaces (Belvedere, Hofburg, Kreuzenstein, Pallavicini, Schoenbrunn). Maurice Chevalier is bearable, and Isabel Jeans, as Sophia's sappy-sophisticated mother, almost makes up for the unfortunate presence of John Gavin, an actor who looks as though he ought to be called Soapstone Hudson.

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