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The Adventuress (Rank; Eagle-Lion) is a bright comedy-melodrama about an Irish female equivalent of Senator Claghorn. The heroine (DeborahKerr), a guileless, broguish biddy from the backcountry, hardly realizes that Cromwell is dead. She has learned to hate the English with all her heart & soul, and has learned very little else. So she gets herself involved in World War II as an assistant to some sinister Nazi spies operating in an English village and on the Isle of Man. Eventually, of course, Miss Kerr sees the error of her ways, takes sides with upright Englishman Trevor Howard, and in a fast chain of movie chases, assures the success of the Normandy invasion.

Producer-Directors Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat have picked up a good many nimble ideas from Alfred Hitchcock. There is a chilling sequence about a spy trapped in a tunnel; in another scene, Miss Kerr, trying to dispose of an embarrassing corpse, disguises it as a wheel-chair gaffer and prams it all over town; in still another, an Irish horse-&-buggy funeral cortege explodes into a hilarious slow-motion chase. Some of the comedy is better than the melodrama; some of it just gets in the melodrama's hair.

Deborah Kerr is a pleasure to look at and a pleasure to watch at work; without her, The Adventuress would be like an egg without salt. But already, in this next-to-last of her English films before Hollywood took her in tow, she has changed noticeably from her earlier roles. Clearly a Star, with an "international" appeal, she already suggests a cross between a junior Greer Garson and a Girl Guide. Students of What Hollywood Does To People will note that a good deal can be done by remote control.

Blaze of Noon (Paramount), a movie about men who fly and a woman who watches & waits, starts off crisply but gets a little soggy as it goes along. It is pleasant enough as long as the four McDonald brothers (Sonny Tufts, William Holden, Stirling Hayden, Johnny Sands) alternate air-circus stunt-flying with easygoing comedy on the ground. As a pretty circus girl Jean Wallace is rather more than pleasant. It is still all right, for a while, when the McDonalds become pioneers at flying the mail, and such skilled workmen as William Bendix and Howard Da Silva get into the picture.

But gradually, as the romance builds up, the story begins to fall apart. Brother Holden marries Anne Baxter. Brother Hayden develops a glum yen for her; she becomes more & more nervous about being married to a family of incurable flyers. The picture becomes a kind of waiting game; every so often another McDonald is shown high in the fog, desperately swabbing his goggles. One by one they leave their profession. One becomes an auto salesman, one is crippled, two are killed.

At its weakest, Blaze of Noon never quite becomes an unlikable movie. Messrs. Hayden and Holden are highly personable in their first cinemacting since the war; Paul Mantz does some good ghost stunting for all four brothers; and occasionally, without sentimentalizing, the picture really captures the obsessive dash of professional airmen. The main trouble is the story: not adequate to the emotions it tries to handle, it loses its drive, charm and eventually its shape.

All in all, the most memorable thing about the show is that Stunter Paul Mantz, in an effort to publicize it, flew from coast to coast in 6 hr. 7 min. 5 sec., breaking a transcontinental record.*

*For single-engine propeller-driven aircraft.

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