The New Pictures

The New Picture

Ziegfeld Follies of 1946 (MGM) may not be the "biggest all-star show of all time," as its sponsors strongly hint, but it will do until a bigger one comes along. A super-spectacular, hyper-Hollywood, tnple-Technicolored variety show, it runs for almost two hours. The total impact is calculated to send cinemaddicts reeling home in a state of dizzy satisfaction.

Mercifully dispensing with all traces of plot, Director Vincente Minnelli gets started with a saccharine bit of professional whimsy purporting to show how the late Flo Ziegfeld is getting along in heaven. (Director Minnelli" thinks he is doing all right, puts Ziegfeld on the same cloud level as Shakespeare.) Once this pious bow to the Master has been made, Follies slips into high gear, runs through one unrelated vaudeville act after another. Among the best:

P: Champion Swimmer Esther Williams, prettiest amphibian of them all, sliding and slithering through water lilies.

P: Loud, ewe-mouthed, old-Ziegfeldian Funny woman Fanny Brice, in a Bronx rage involving her husband, her landlord and a winning sweepstake ticket.

P: Pert Judy Garland (Mrs. Vincente Minnelli) burlesquing a world-weary but oh-so-cordial movie queen in a dance-and-doggerel brush with the press. P: Tenor James Melton and Soprano Marion Bell warbling their way through the wine-cup scene from Verdi's La Traviata.

P: Debonair Dancer Fred Astaire matching taps with Gene Kelly, also lightfooting with ex-Copacabana show girl Lucille Bremer through a magnificent pantomime of Limehouse Blues.

Elsewhere the talents of Victor Moore, Kathryn Grayson, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Keenan Wynn and Lena Home peep through the shuffle and bustle. The whole is well-buttressed, as the Master would surely have it, with the Technicolored verities of the half-naked female form.

Kitty (Paramount), a lively 18th-Century costume romance, introduces a fullblown cockney waif (Paulette Goddard) to the studio of none other than the great Thomas Gainsborough (Cecil Kellaway).

The artist sniffs, sends Kitty off to an adjacent powder room to wash. Then he puts her in position (with suitable decolletage), cocks a critical eye, takes up an artistic stance, begins to sketch. It is only a matter of time before Kitty's portrait hangs with Gainsborough's Blue Boy at the Royal Academy, and she, a great London lady, drives the peerage half-mad with her charms.

Kitty was taken from a lending-library novel of the same name by Rosamond Marshall. Not the least remarkable thing about the movie is the blandness with which it denatures the heroine of the original book--as loose, if not as active, a hussy as the notorious Fanny Hill. Sample dialogue from the book: "His naked body was darker than the linen sheet on which he rested. ... I bent over him and kissed him the way he had kissed me. . . . Suddenly his teeth bit into my flesh. I gave a little moan. . . ."

In the movie, Kitty is almost as blameless as Cotton Mather's third wife. But she makes out well in spite of her virtues, marrying the gouty old Duke of Malmunster and finally, after his death, falling into the arms of Sir Hugh Marcy (Ray Milland).

Director Mitchell Leisen obviously went to extraordinary lengths to make Kitty's costumes, props and sets look like the real thing. He could hardly have been more reverent in evoking the proper atmosphere had he been doing a story of Elsie Dinsmore.

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