New Picture

Claudia (20th Century-Fox) furnishes dozens of adroit excuses for laughing about a U.S. character as typical and beloved as the Mickeys (Rooney and Mouse)--the Child Wife, Suburban Style.

Claudia, the child wife, is Dorothy McGuire, who perfected the part on Broadway. She is flanked by a dominant mother (Ina Claire) and by a Job-like husband (Robert Young).

The story of Claudia is chiefly the silly, funny, exasperating, infantile things she does in the course of growing into her marriage. For an hour or so, Claudia wags elbows, knees and tongue in a subadolescent manner that would send any husband less tenderly crucified than Robert Young on a screaming sprint for a psychiatrist, a desert island, or an ax. She suggests that her husband, if he is more man than mouse, will simply refuse to pay his income tax. She sells his beloved house to a high-pitched Russian soprano (oldtime Cinemantrap Olga Baclanova in a miscast comeback). Whenever her husband's long suffering slips a notch, Claudia gravitates to Mother with the velocity of an interplanetary rocket. It is plain that nothing but a miracle or the overwhelming facts of life could rescue Claudia from her mental bassinet. Author Rose Franken makes use of life's facts, to suggest, without really achieving, the miracle. She clouts Claudia with 1) a blitz pregnancy, 2) her mother's imminent death (from cancer). The double blow brings Claudia from empty-headed infantilism to the threshold of maturity. Some cinemaddicts may feel that one of life's more solemn mysteries is sold at cut rate by Claudia's magnificat when she finds she is about to have a baby: "God is swell."

Dorothy McGuire at 25 looks so precisely like the sort of Middlewestern middle-class girl you might see crossing any Eastern campus because that is exactly what she is. Daughter of an Omaha lawyer, isolated in her early teens first by her parents' divorce and then her father's tragic death, she was educated in an Indianapolis convent school and at Pine Manor Junior College at Wellesley, Mass.

Even at 13 Miss McGuire was doing well for herself on the stage. In an Omaha production of A Kiss For Cinderella she tried her best not to hog the show, for the sake of a shy, obscure young Omaha actor named Henry Fonda, who has never forgotten the kindness. But her automatic ability to charm an audience did not save Dorothy McGuire a few hard years. Her skillful replacement of Martha Scott in Our Town went unnoticed; her understudying of Julie Haydon in The Time of Your Life got her nowhere.

The 210th candidate for the stage role of Claudia, little Miss McGuire copped the job hands down on the strength of her general appearance. She almost flunked out when she read the part. Reason: she was so lovelorn over her failure to get a part in Philip Barry's Liberty Jones.

When at last Miss McGuire transferred her affections to Claudia, the audience at a Washington tryout had an electrifying experience. They saw a pretty, pug-nosed little woman articulate, with something of the luminous otherworldliness of Maude Adams and with some resourceful, intelligent acting--a Golden Treasury of U.S. schoolgirlishness.

Actress McGuire, like Claudia, has the appetite of a famished goat, cannot balance her checkbook, looks best in genteel sweaters and no makeup, mimics as unaffectedly as a parrot, and has a puppyish blend of grace and clumsiness (she is quite sensitive about her Garboesque feet).

What to do next is Miss* McGuire's most pressing problem. For Actress McGuire is versatile and her versatility is as genuine as her desire not to play baby wives for the rest of her youth.

*Since July, Dorothy McGuire's household name has been Mrs. John (son of B.E.) Swope.

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