The New Pictures

On Approval (Gainsborough-English Films), an English comedy starring Beatrice Lillie, may or may not win general U.S. approval. It is pleasant at all times, and very funny in spots, but nine-tenths of it is enjoyable in proportion to your pleasure in the cliches of drawing-room dialogue, setting, character, gesture and costume of a departed day.

On Approval is "a daring modern comedy" written by Frederick Lonsdale in 1927 and set "in grandmother's day." It has been adapted for the screen by Actor Clive Brook, who also produced it, directed it (beautifully), and plays the male lead in it (still better). The lighting is deliberately archaic; the sets and props are an elegant combination of the suffocatingly ratty and the nostalgically exact.

The costumes are by Cecil Beaton, who evidently lost his heart but not his wits in somebody's attic. The characters, their plight, their lines, their postures and emo tional attitudes are as exquisitely stylized as classical ballet.

The story : the impoverished and wolfish Duke of Bristol (Clive Brook), his impoverished and meek friend Richard (Ro land Culver), a statuesque American pickle heiress (Googie Withers) enamored of the Duke, and a heartless, sporty widow named Mrs. Wislack (Beatrice Lillie) abandon London's high life for the widow's island shooting lodge in Scotland. Mrs. Wislack's shocking intention is to take cringing Richard for a month "on approval" before she decides whether to make an honest and rich man of him.

In the course of a few weeks' rustication, the pickle heiress realizes what a monument of selfishness the Duke is, and gets over her love for him. Richard wearies of making spaniel eyes at the termagant widow and rejects her quite brutally when she decides he'll do. And all four, neck-deep in subplot and mutual deception, spend a rambunctiously funny night dreaming about each other (the principals as living statues in slow, then fast motion).

Beatrice Lillie, at the piano, sings I'm Just Seventeen and I've Never Been and, in asthmatic duet with Mr. Brook, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes. She delivers the perfect Lillie line, "You will find the dinghy by the jetty." But the essence of On Approval's charm is not in such familiar bravura; it is in the muted perfection of Miss Lillie's general performance, and in the excellence of the supporting players. It is in the way Clive Brook handles his stick and gloves, or invites himself downstairs for a drink with his former butler, or ribs "daring" pictures in a male bathtub scene which is the nakedest thing outside a travelogue in years. It is the tone in which Roland Culver murmurs "Many congratulations" after Mrs. Wislack's announcement that her income is -L-25,000 a year. It is in Miss Withers' rejection of the Duke--the prettiest, quietest kidding of British drawing-room drama on record. There has probably never been a richer, funnier anthology of late-Victorian mannerisms.

Report on Italy (MARCH OF TIME-20th Century-Fox) shows some of the reasons why the Allied Control Commission cannot help it if woebegone, embittered Italians are chalking on Roman walls, "Give us back the old stinker!" Best reason: there is a war on, to which the Italian people inevitably come second. The film also contains some extraordinarily moving and terrible shots of:

P: Some of the 320 antiFascists whom Nazis killed in Rome's Ardeatine Caves.

P: Their heartbroken women, some of whom make it clear that not all the enormous gestures of grand opera are just stage business.

P: The ferocious courtroom mobbing of Fascist Jailer Donato Carretta, and of his corpse hanging by the feet on the wall of his jail.

P: The execution of Police Chief Pietro Caruso: his unendurable eyes, in his prison bed; his tallow legs as he is helped from a car to the ground where he is to die; the terse, almost anticlimactic shock of the moment when 16 rifles knock him from his chair.

There are also shots by the dozen of anguished, bewildered human beings, mutely questioning the script's assumption of Italy's all but universal guilt and shame.

Bring On the Girls (Paramount), a passably entertaining picture, is mainly notable as the first which has given Sonny Tufts a fair chance to disclose his substantial talents as a comedian. Looking, as usual, like a bored lion bothered by mice, Mr. Tufts twice bursts into song, helping himself out at the piano; he sings Egyptian Ella and I'm Gonna Hate Myself in the Morning with something of Hoagy Carmichael's honkytonality and an engaging ease not unworthy of Bing the Groaner himself.

For the rest, Sonny plays bodyguard to Eddie Bracken, a millionaire subject to maltreatment by girls. His particular chore is to fend off Veronica Lake, a gold digger who stakes out the scion and starts panning far upstream. During the best sequence of Bring On the Girls Mr. Bracken pretends to be deaf in order to learn, by what they feel free to say in his presence, which of his friends really like him and which are just along for the ride. The best that his butler (Alan Mowbray) can say for him is "Birdbrain."

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