The New Pictures

The Dolly Sisters (20th Century-Fox) is a nostalgic, casually biographical cinemusical based on the careers of the Hungarian immigrant twins born Roszicka and Jancsi Deutsch. The Dolly Sisters, professional song & dance artists, cut a merry swath through a crop of heavy spenders in the days when one way to drink champagne, supposedly, was out of ladies' evening slippers. Jenny Dolly (now dead), more spectacular than Rosie, once broke the Casino at Cannes, won 12,000,000 francs in two days of baccarat at Le Touquet and skinned a notorious character named Amletto Battisti of 5,000,000 francs at Nice. One morning, strolling down the Esplanade at Cannes on the arm of a gallant London department store tycoon, she spotted a 52-carat, $250,000 diamond ring in a jeweler's window and wheedled him into buying it on the spot. All this & more she eventually spent or hocked.

Alike as two rhinestones, Betty Grable and June Haver give a leggy impersonation of the Dollys without ever suggesting that the originals were anything but a couple of apple-cheeked lasses who strolled dewy-eyed through the fleshpots of Broadway, London and the Riviera.

There is very little to distinguish this show from the bright, glossy Technicolored musicals which Darryl Zanuck dishes out several times each year. Like all the others, The Dolly Sisters, which launches George Jessel as a Hollywood producer, has a plot concocted of time-tested staples: the kindly, absent-minded accent (S. K. Sakall); the handsome, threadbare song-plugger (John Payne); the rich, respectable fop (Reginald Gardiner); the old-time hit tune (I'm Always Chasing Rainbows); the lavish dance sequence (performed in blackface on a 75-foot banjo to the tune of Darktown Strutters' Ball). The only really fresh face belongs to Frank Latimore, who plays Chicago department-store tycoon Irving Netcher (who is Rosie's current, real-life husband).

The Spanish Main (RKO Radio) is the kind of pleasant nonsense that has become practically a lost art: a gaudy, fancy-dress romance with a handsome, Robin-Hooded hero, a lovely, menaced heroine and dark, churlish villains. Director Frank Borzage has appropriately filmed it all in a blaze of riotous, slam-bang Technicolor.

The story, such as it is, is concerned with Pirate Laurent Van Horn (Paul Henreid), an ex-Dutch sea captain, fat, dastardly Spanish Governor Don Alvarado (Walter Slezak) and aristocratic Francisca (Maureen O'Hara). There is all sorts of high-spirited romancing, pirate treachery, Iberian cruelty and slashing sword play before Van Horn and Francisca finally sail away together into an almost overpoweringly golden sunrise.

Sparing no expense, RKO has contrived to get this fancy swash buckled with enthusiasm and good taste.

George White's Scandals (RKO Radio) will come as something of a shock to young cinemaddicts who have always heard that there is nothing like the good old days in show business. Scandals -- particularly its gags -- is exactly like the old days and is thus likely to excite only a few nostalgic oldtimers.

Joan Davis, now a ranking radio comic, is harnessed to the bulk of the script. She pulls strenuously at such lines as (gazing into her looking glass): "My, how this mirror has aged." Joan's partner in the proceedings is Veteran Jack Haley, whose stock role of a blithe nitwit has not altered noticeably in recent years.

There are a few musical interludes which may possibly perk up drowsy customers: an organ treatment of Liza by Ethel Smith and some passionate jive by Gene Krupa's orchestra and drums.

American Beauty (MARCH OF TIME) examines the U.S. woman in the act of making herself alluring. The average man may enjoy watching as American womanhood is kneaded, pummeled, baked, scented and shellacked into shape--a series of tortures for which the victims cheerfully pay $1 billion a year.

The beauty business in action is ready-made comedy, and MOT plays it for laughs. The best of these: 1) the mumbo-jumbo of the more high-priced practitioners; 2) the sight of the more obese customers fighting a determined and courageous fight in the "battle of the bulge" with rollers, pounders and vibrators.

Lest the male audience snicker too loudly, the camera sneaks up on men spending another 300 million annually in the same pursuits. MOT's questionable conclusion after displaying all this "discreetly conspicuous waste": the U.S. quest for beauty is not a means to an end but an end in itself.

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