The New Pictures

My Gal Sal (20th Century-Fox) is the kind of bright, tuneful, lighthearted musical that was once Broadway's dish. It has the authentic Tin-Pan Alley touch--gilded by the nostalgic charm of the nicely naughty '90s. It also has so many other good things that it is a rare cinema treat.

A warm share of Sal's appeal is owing to the man it celebrates: genial, sentimental, gargantuan (300 lb.) Paul Dresser, onetime minstrel, most popular song writer of the '90s, and oldest brother of lugubrious Novelist Theodore Dreiser (who kept the original family name). Dreiser, who wrote the first verse and the chorus of one of his brother's best songs (On the Banks of the Wabash), also wrote the story on which Sal is based.

Although one of Hollywood's almost unbearably beautiful young males, Victor Mature, plays the Dresser role, he is generally bearable. Whenever he gets coy, out of character and into fatuity, Director Irving Cummings distracts attention from him with a mighty pretty red herring: beauteous Rita Hayworth, who, in Technicolor, singing and dancing her way through eight melodies, is enough to raise hair on the boys in baldhead row.

As a pretty, American musicomedy star with a headful of russet red curls, Miss Hayworth meets Dresser on the Chautauqua circuit, irks him to Manhattan, sings his songs, falls in & out of love with him to the final fadeout. Director Cummings never lets these familiar tactics grow tiresome. Blessed with some truly imaginative and exciting sets, some of the best musical arrangements of this or any other season, a powderbox-full of new dance routines, inspired costuming, he manages to make the gaslight era seem just around a very inviting corner.

Because only six of the Dresser melodies (best: My Gal Sal, Wabash, The Convict and The Bird) were considered sufficiently undated, Songwriters Leo Robin and Ralph Rainger turned out four new tunes. Any or all of them (Here You Are, Oh, The Pity Of It All, Me and My Fella, On The Great White Way) should be best-seller-bound.

Twentieth Century has been considerably disturbed because Sal's big secret leaked out: Rita Hayworth's Grade-A singing voice belongs to Radio Songstress Nan Wynn. Fortunately for all concerned, the voice sounds like Rita. And no pseudonymous voice ever had a more attractive sponsor.

Suicide Squadron (Republic) is an all-English picture, made in England for Republic's account. It is an ably written, superbly acted job, whose wartime story suffers somewhat from the fact that World War II has long passed it by.

Because the hero (Anton Walbrook) is a famed Polish pianist, Suicide Squadron resounds with melody. Its background score, composed by Richard Addinsel, is alone worth the price of admission. The picture follows Patriot Walbrook from gutted Warsaw to the U.S., underscores his marriage to a pretty U.S. heiress (Sally Gray) and her misbegotten attempt to keep him from flying with the remnants of his Polish squadron, reassembled in England.

Actors Walbrook, Gray and the rest of the cast make a good thing out of this somewhat talky story of yesteryear. Walbrook, in particular, is assured and convincing; Miss Gray, an attractive blonde who can also act, is a pleasure to watch. So is the final reel of air combat between the R.A.F. and Hitler's Luftwaffe. Some of it looks familiar by now, but much is new film, exciting, and unquestionably the real stuff.

Durable Eunice

Eunice Squires is the kind of girl Hollywood lives and works for. She saw 633 movies last year. That is more movies than most people see in a lifetime. It is also about as many movies as Hollywood can make in a year. This adoration of the movie cost Eunice last year approximately $200 and 1,000 hours in the dark.

Eunice is a 21-year-old Arkansan (Little Rock). Between movies, she keeps house for her mother and two sisters. Comely, brown-haired, hazel-eyed, a teetotaling Baptist, she gave up stenography because it interfered with her avocation.

Although Greater Little Rock has 14 cinemansions, it is not big enough to hold Eunice. Fortnight ago she went to Memphis, Tenn., to catch her first sight of Walt Disney's Fantasia. If she likes a picture, there is no telling how many times she may see it. She has seen Rebecca 20 times, Gone With the Wind six times.

Since Eunice started her serious cinemactivity, six years ago, she has developed a method in her cinemania. No longer obsessed with stars, she watches the direction and other technical aspects of pictures.

She has become convinced that Hollywood could use her--not as a star, but as Hollywood's other female director.*

* At present, stocky, competent, boyish-bobbed Dorothy Arzner (Craig's Wife, Sarah and Son, etc.) is Hollywood's only woman director.

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