The New Pictures

Can't Help Singing (Universal) cost $2,500,000 to produce, has a Jerome Kern score, throstle-throated Deanna Durbin, and the evident fine intention of turning out a cinemusical as full of sunlit Americana as Oklahoma!. As such it deserves a pleasant fate, and may earn it at the box office. But it can hardly fare well with critics, even the most generous.

There is nothing wrong with its basic story--Miss Durbin's transcontinental pursuit of the officer she thinks she loves, by covered wagon (the year is 1849); ner Senator father's (Ray Collins) pursuit of her; her ultimate discovery that she really loves her traveling companion (Robert Paige), a cardsharp. In fact, that sort of easy foolishness might make just the right sort of clothesline to hang a beautiful show on. But such a show needs delicate direction, which can kid it along over the bigger, sillier bumps, and make every possible use of its natural beauty. There is no finesse about the kidding in Can't Help Singing, and little astuteness in the use of the open country, the wagons and the people crossing it, or the whole sunrise sense of the period.

The tunes, however, especially More and More, Californ-i-ay, and the title song which is caroled in an early American bathhouse, are solid enough Kern, if a touch too operatic for the winter's juke boxes. And Miss Durbin, whose hair has been dyed a pleasing pink for her first appearance as a Technicoloratura, still sings charmingly and still suggests what she has only once had half-a-chance (in Christmas Holiday) to prove: that she is a big girl now, and could step out of her candy box to become one of the most high-powered sex-actresses in Hollywood.

Belle of the Yukon (International--RKO) is the first clean miss by last year's most professional new cinema outfit. International Pictures (Casanova Brown, Woman at the Window). As a musicomic vehicle for Gypsy Rose Lee, it is hampered not only by its own slowfootedness but by the fact that Miss Lee, America's most literate ecdysiast, has learned to silver-plate her sex with such cultivated English that she suggests Lady Windermere's Fan Dance.

Hollywood Canteen (Warner). It was Warner Bros.' idea that in this picture about Hollywood's focal point of patriotism-in-person, stars of all studios should forget their differences and twinkle at each other in the friendliest of spirits. The refusal of the other studios to see it their way had much to do with Warners' withdrawal from the Hays Office. The effect on the picture has been, on the whole, unfortunate. Unable to make it clear that the Canteen is an all-Hollywood affair, Warner Bros, has gone rather more than all out the other way, and treats itself as if rice were slithering out of its lingerie. But as a grab bag of short turns, encores and gracious gestures by well-liked Warner names (Dennis Morgan, Jack Benny, John Garfield, Bette Davis, Jane Wyman, S. Z. Sakall) and name bands (Jimmy Dorsey, Carmen Cavallaro), Hollywood Canteen is pleasant enough until it becomes plethoric.

Beachhead to Berlin (U.S. Coast Guard; Warner). This two-reel Coast Guard film lacks the sustained high cinematic level and intensity of the best U.S. war films. But it contains scenes which show D-day in a tragic splendor which no other film has caught so well. The best of these shots give the event something of its scope and meaning against the.even greater scope and meaning of nature, for they catch (in color) the conclave of great ships and the deadly surge shoreward of landing craft under fire, among the all but unbelievable lights and tints of a sea daybreak. In one of the best shots of all, sand and sea and sky combine colors so tender, in so untender a context, that for a moment all color and action seem annulled, as if this prenatal-like stillness were the dead center of history's uncontrollable storm.

Tomorrow, the World! (United Artists) is a straightforward screen version of last year's straightforward stage melodrama (TIME, April 26, 1943) about the little boy from Hitler's Germany who brings his Nazi-conditioned reflexes into a liberal-minded American household and practically destroys it before he begins to see the dawn's early light.

At first Emil's Uncle Mike (Fredric March) and Mike's fiancee Leona (Betty Field) are no more than amusedly mystified by the child's heel-clicking, catatonic gestures of patriotism. His new schoolmates, too, are a lot more lenient and courteous than they would be apt to be in real life; for a time the harmless little Scouts find his deadly weapons and deadlier ideas quite exciting.

But when Emil slashes to ribbons the portrait of his martyred anti-Nazi father, calls Leona a Jewish tramp, bullies a Polish boy and blackmails a little girl into lying about it, tries to force his uncle's desk in search of important military information, and uses every means of whining, ingratiation and deceit at his young command to get the members of the family against one another and to wreck the prospective marriage, it begins to become clear even to those who wish him well that Hitler's Bad Boy is an abysmally different species from Peck's. Indeed it is hardly necessary for Emil to try to murder his young cousin (Joan Carroll) to convince everyone that he is, in fact, a symptom of a very ugly kind of social disease, a possibly incurable human being, at twelve.

Because it does not have to crowd the child's progressive deviltries into a few solid blocks of stage action, the film makes Emil a more thoroughly plausible character than he was in the play.

Nearly all the supporting performances, especially those of Fredric March, Betty Field, and Agnes Moorhead as a confused spinster, are warm and sympathetic; and young Skippy Homeier captures as remarkably as ever the pathetic, frightening, overtones of the poisoned, pernicious little hero he created on the stage.

But the screen version of Tomorrow, the World! preserves intact and unimproved the play's prime weakness. The protagonist, son of a heroic anti-Nazi, learned to despise his father and to adore Hitler almost wholly through terror rather than persuasion. He is thus too specialized a case to represent the common run of Hitler's children, or to prove, in the story's closing suggestion that he is reconstructible, that there is any such hope for them.

Music for Millions (M.G.M.) has two sterling assets: Margaret O'Brien and Jimmy Durante. June Allyson, as a pregnant bull-fiddler in a symphony orchestra conducted by Jose Iturbi, also performs with touching intensity. But the plethora of money lavished on this production, contrasted with the paucity of imagination and taste, makes an excessively lopsided picture. Typical stupenditure: the Misses Allyson and O'Brien walking mile after mile up the nave of a gigantic studio church, at thousands of dollars per step.

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