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Hit Parade of 1947 (Republic) might have been one of the pleasantest surprises of the season if it had lived up to the best that is in it. As it stands, it is an uneven but unexpectedly engaging musical, featuring some nice, attractive people (notably Eddie Albert and Joan Edwards), some nice songs by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson (notably I Guess I'll Have That Dream Right Now), and some fresh story ideas (by Mary Loos, Anita's niece).

The best idea: Eddie Albert is a cocky, unsophisticated provincial with a talent for writing tunes and a misguided mania for hyper-sophisticated lyrics (Psychopathology, psychopathology, you're the girl for me, he yammers abstractedly, trying it on for the polysyllables). He is sure that all a songwriter has to do to panic Park Avenue nightclubbers is to write lyrics that insult them enough. But when the Big Chance comes, the customers don't see it his way and Eddie and his good friends Miss Edwards, Constance Moore and Gil Lamb are suddenly at liberty.

Most of the show is easygoing, as cinemusicals should always be and seldom are; it is also unpretentious, as the big musicals practically never are.

Love and Learn (Warner), like Hit Parade (see above), is a comedy about songwriters trying to get ahead. But Hit Parade, by telling its story simply and with humor, and giving a reasonable facsimile of how entertainment people look and feel, is fairly pleasant. Love and Learn by telling its story with tinny wit, and shoving its inert characters through tortuous farcical situations, is rather a bore.

A Park Avenue princess (Martha Vickers), fond of a songwriting pauper (Robert Hutton), naturally pretends to be a girl of the people. Just as naturally, he first mistakes her for a schizophrenic kleptomaniac, next mistakes her be-limousined father for a sugar daddy. As anyone could predict, Boy eventually becomes so successful that at picture's end he can stand the shock of learning who Girl really is. Otto Kruger supplies his touch of suavity, Jack Carson his considerable comic talent, and Janis Paige her banjo eyes and pretty curves--but none of these attractions can save the tired old story.

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