New Picture

Mr. Potts Goes to Moscow (Associated British Pathe; Stratford) gets hold of a genuinely comic idea but never quite brings it off. Potts (played by British Actor George Cole, who starred as the kiteflying husband in Somerset Maugham's Quartet) is a sanitation engineer who has been designing the men's rooms at a British atomic-research center. Bound for a French vacation, he innocently walks off with the wrong briefcase, containing top-secret plans of a new Abomb. With England in an uproar and security officers searching everywhere for him, Potts is waylaid by Russian agents, plied with vodka, and whisked off to Moscow for what he thinks is a job of applying badly needed improvements to Soviet plumbing.

Once Potts discovers that he is carrying top-secret papers, the film switches from an agreeable spoof of security agents to a slapstick comedy of Keystone Cops vintage. Trying desperately to hide the plans, Potts teeters on the window ledge of a Moscow hotel, temporarily loses himself among the parading delegates of an East Berlin World Peace Congress, leaps dizzily from rooftop to rooftop with police in hot pursuit.

Though a far cry from Ninotchka, the 1939 anti-Communist comedy starring Garbo, Mr. Potts does have some fun with the stuffy officialdom of both East and West.

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