The New Pictures

Blue Skies (Paramount) has Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire and a couple of dozen old & new Irving Berlin melodies. Millions of moviegoers, happily fighting their way to the box office, will ask nothing more of this $3 million Technicolored exhibition of Old Masters.

Bing (whose gross income this year will exceed $1 1/2 million) has never been in better voice. Astaire, at 47, seems to step as nimbly as he ever did. The Berlin tunes and lyrics--from All Alone right up to the new You Keep Coming Back Like a Song--are as sweetly foolish and affecting as young love itself. The only real trouble with this big, pretty song & dance is the tedious plot it is hung on. Crosby and Astaire, seasoned enough showmen to know that nothing is really required of them except their standard suave recitals, treat the story to the offhand snubbing it deserves. But for 104 minutes it keeps coming back like a musicomedy plot.

Both boys are in love with the same beautiful blonde (Joan Caulfield). She admires Fred's hoofing, as who does hot? But no lady could be expected to hold out against Bing's crooning. Married, singer and girl plunge into a peculiar marital conflict. Bing makes his living by buying & selling successful nightclubs. He plainly enjoys his work and does well enough at it to provide the little woman with striking Edith Head gowns and the smartest interiors that Paramount's art department can whip together. But Joan is terribly depressed by it all. Bing's admittedly eccentric profession fills her with deep insecurity and a sense of her husband's unstable character. Fortunately, while she broods about her soap opera dilemma, Bing has an opportunity to sing snatches of some 21 lovely songs and Astaire goes into his dance.

After 42 years of dancing in public, including 20 movies for which he has devised some 100 dance routines, Fred Astaire vows he is through, now that Blue Skies is completed. "I've had a long, long career," says the man who began hoofing in Omaha at five and was a Broadway star at 17. "There comes a day when people begin to say, 'Why doesn't that old duffer retire?' I want to get out while they're still saying that Astaire is a hell of a dancer." Henceforth, he will probably produce movies and open a chain of schools.

A routine called Puttin' on the Ritz, one dazzling scene in Blue Skies where trick photography fills the screen with a full chorus of fast-stepping Astaires, will not dim his reputation as a hell of a dancer. The hardest of four numbers he designed for the picture, it took him five weeks of what he calls "backbreaking physical work."

A burlesque vaudeville act, called A Couple of Song & Dance Men, was comparatively easy. Fred worked it out in a mere ten days with a stand-in dancer and then taught Bing to mimic the standin. Astaire's considered critique of Crosby's hoofing: "Bing is a wonderful performer. His dancing tickles me to death. But if I said he was a good dancer, it would be the same as Bing calling me a good singer."

The Cockeyed Miracle (MGM) and Angel on My Shoulder (Charles R. Rogers-United Artists) illustrate Hollywood's rather alarming drift--which may become an out-&-out trend--toward fantasy. Both pictures are lighthearted efforts to examine, with trick camera work, some of the problems of life-after-death.

In The Cockeyed Miracle, Ghost Frank Morgan, 56, and his late father, thirtyish Keenan Wynn, who obviously died at an early age, wander raffishly through a romantic farce. Their problem: to straighten out a few domestic-financial tangles which were left unsolved when Mr. Morgan was struck down by a heart attack. The movie is inoffensive fooling, but talented Comics Morgan and Wynn have reason to accuse their employers of unkind and inhuman treatment.

Angel on My Shoulder presents Paul Muni as a murdered gangster and Claude Rains as the Devil. Aiming at satire with a touch of uplift, the picture succeeds in being vaguely grisly and definitely foolish. Actor Muni's natural dignity, which prevents him from appearing ridiculous in embarrassing surroundings, is all that saves the movie from disaster.

Critics who have complained of Hollywood's gross materialism may now look forward with misgivings to an era of Hollywood "spirituality." Several new pictures contain spooks, pixies, articulate animals, reincarnation, assorted extrasensory adventures. Forthcoming whimsy for cinemagoers to watch for--or watch out for:

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (20th Century-Fox) is the story of a departed British sea captain (Rex Harrison) who haunts a house occupied by an attractive young widow.

My Brother Who Talks to Horses (MGM) stars "Butch" Jenkins, 9, who gets sensationally reliable racing tips from his friend, a well-informed horse.

In It's a Wonderful Life (Liberty Films), Jimmy Stewart remarks, "I wish I was dead." A sprite takes Jimmy seriously and shows him, in flashbacks, what would have happened if he had never lived.

In The Return of October (Columbia), a young girl recognizes in a horse named October certain unmistakable personality traits of her late uncle.

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