The New Pictures

A Christmas Carol (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) leans a little too heavily on the assumption that cinemaddicts' eyes, starved by months of Hollywood's thin fare, will not be able to keep from watering over Charles Dickens' famed classic about Scrooge, Marley, Cratchits and Christmas spirit. Consequently, while A Christmas Carol is doubtless an invaluable addition to holiday lists of worth-while pictures for juvenile audiences, it cannot be recommended unreservedly to adults--unless to those who feel that the mere transposition of such a classic to the Hollywood screen constitutes an excuse for general hosannas.

In the deep drifts of artificial snow, cold storage poultry, painfully quaint mannerisms and hideously false joviality which load this tender fable, certain genuine bits stand out by contrast. One is Reginald Owen's well modulated performance as Scrooge, which should long remain a model for enthusiastic neophyte actors who essay this role in high-school productions of the same work. Another is the reading of the nerve-racking part of Tiny Tim by eleven-year-old Terry Kilburn, who almost manages to make his notorious curtain line (''God bless us every one") seem warranted under the circumstances. Least appetizing shot: the greedy members of the Cratchit family gleefully fingering the pitiful corpse of their uncooked Christmas goose.

Heart of the North (Warner Bros.). The Arctic Queen is steaming up the Yukon River with a shipment of gold and furs. And then? Bandits in fur caps remove its cargo. And then? The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who keep their coats on even when paddling canoes, contrive to catch the bandits.

For Heart of the North, not to be confused with Spawn of the North (TIME, Sept. 5), Warner Bros, dumped 1,500 Ibs. of dye into the studio lake to make it blue enough to serve as a satisfactory Technicolor background for innumerable fights, canoe trips, duellos and hairbreadth escapes of a lively, oldfashioned, fir-tree melodrama. Typical shot: Dick Foran and Russell Simpson wrestling on the edge of a cliff, while Allen Jenkins watches from the underbrush.

Thanks for Everything (Twentieth Century-Fox), not to be confused with Thanks for the Memory (see p. 22). explodes the theory that a genuinely funny story would be out of place in musicomedy. Instead of a show-girl heroine who gets her name in lights in the last reel, it presents, without apologies, the sad case of Henry Smith (Jack Haley) of Plainville, Mo., winner of a $25,000 prize for the Average American.

Henry Smith is so average that J. B. Harcourt (Adolphe Menjou) and his assistant, Brady (Jack Oakie), promoters of the contest, decide to make him a sort of industrial guinea pig to serve as an inexpensive substitute for the Gallup Polls and FORTUNE Surveys. The system works to everyone's advantage except Henry's until he is called upon to decide when and why the average U. S. citizen would go to war. At this point Thanks for Everything explodes into a climax which combines straight slapstick with vigorous satire on such U. S. preoccupations as the advertising business, manufactured war scares, quack psychiatry, 1939 World's Fairs.

Originally intended as a vehicle for Eddie Cantor, Thanks for Everything might have been made to order for Jack Haley, who contrives to seem just as woebegone as Cantor with much less facial exertion. Best song: Gordon & Revel's You're the World's Fairest.

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