The New Pictures

Les Girls (MGM) will unquestionably be remembered by millions as La Girl, and Kay Kendall is her name. Up till now she has been famous only as that girl who blew the trumpet in Genevieve and in real life got married to Rex Harrison (TIME, July 1); but with the release of this picture she stands up on her own true feats to be counted as a major star. She is probably the most beautiful and deft comedienne the British have produced since the late Gertrude Lawrence.

Tall (5 ft. 9 1/2 in.), slender, exquisite Actress Kendall seems at one moment to have come sauntering elegantly out of a Gainsborough portrait, yet at the next she is helling about the screen like a Hogarth hoyden. There is Kay in the height of Paris fashion, triumphant on the witness stand; Kay slinking about in skintights, silkily eluding an incipient pinch; Kay staggering under a giant bouquet of sunflowers, hurling herself into a violent off-to-Buffalo; Kay drunk and belching through a lusty diaphragmentation of the Habanera from Carmen ("All ze men, zay want my --ceegarettes"). And always, in every word and gesture, there is the sense of style--the grand, grandstand style that harks back, in the British tradition, to the Restoration theater of manners.

Quite apart from Kay Kendall, Les Girls is a fine musical comedy--easily the best that Hollywood has put together since An American in Paris and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (also M-G-M productions). The picture has only a second-drawer score by Cole Porter, but Director George Cukor has shrewdly managed to make the least of it, and to make the most of a marvelous run of creative luck. Gene Kelly dances less than usual, and rather better. Mitzi Gaynor, whose face most Hollywood cameramen have in the past been careful to undertook, is revealed to have a bright and charming one that is capable of expressing a rather pretty wit. And Taina Elg, a ballerina seen in her first important screen role, will undoubtedly be seen again.

Quickly digesting the platefuls of sweet reviews of Les Girls, Kay Kendall wasted no time in explaining where she fits and with whom. "Women should be a tiny, tiny bit inferior to their husbands," says she. "I don't want to do anything but be with Rex." Still under contract to J. Arthur Rank, for whom she will do three more pictures, Kay is in no particular hurry to go back to Hollywood, is currently letting her hazel eyes scan a pile of play scripts, hoping to discover something that suits her, "so I can keep the same hours as Rex does."

Kay has been proclaimed by the critics as that rare beauty who is also funny. To this she scoffs patriotically: "I never thought of myself as beautiful. Millions of women in England look like me." By the time World War II broke out, Kay, at 13, had already crammed in six years of ballet lessons, spent the war years playing in musical comedies all over the British Isles. "I was a blitz baby, myself. I lived on rations when I was growing up. The majority of English girls haven't bosoms. I always wanted them and I'm jealous of people who have."

After her trumpeted performance in Genevieve (she was generally considered funnier than the star of the show--an old car), Kay's beguiling beauty and down-to-earth sophistication pushed her to movie stardom. She was paid $100,000 for Les Girls.

With Harrison onstage night after night playing My Fair Lady, Kay spends her time touring theaters (she claims to have seen all on-and off-Broadway shows) or listening to American jazz (old Bessie Smith records) in their rented Manhasset, N.Y. home. "I've had too many years of rushing around from hotel to hotel and town to town and waking up alone in the morning." At 31, Kay Kendall says: "It's a joy for me to have a home, dogs and husband--not necessarily in that order."

No Down Payment (20th Century-Fox), based on the recent novel by John McPartland, puts itself forward as a fairly serious contribution in a field that only a dozen years ago was nothing but a dandelion patch: the sociology of the packaged community.

In the years since World War II millions of Americans have moved into thousands of new communities that have sprung full-furbished from an architect's brain. And the big housing developments --alternatively praised as the first fruits of social engineering, and damned as the most fantastically irreal estate since Prince Potemkin's villages--have had a drastic effect on the American way of life. But who can actually say what the effect has been? Have they created a split-level personality? Is the American male developing a barbecue pituitary or a carport stoop? Is his wife, with all her built-in conveniences, becoming a technological unemployee?

No Down Payment suggests some shocking answers. In this picture the dream houses of a short-drive-from-the-city development known as Sunrise Hills turn out to be nothing better than air-conditioned nightmares. The point is illustrated in the lives of eight inhabitants of this magnificently planned slum--four young couples "thrown together," as the book's blurb explains, "in the devastating intimacy of a four-house courtyard."

Couple One is a somewhat surreal composition: an oversexed grease monkey (Cameron Mitchell) married to what he calls, when he's sore at her, "common Tennessee dirt" (Joanne Woodward). The girl looks like a chippy, and she can drink like a French drain when she's a mind to, but all she really wants is Social Acceptance and A Baby of Her Own. He, on the other hand, is strictly a smalltime sadist whose idea of fun is to kill Japs, and whose ambition is to be the local chief of police.

Couple Two is the uneasy union of a shy young scientist (Jeffrey Hunter) and the sort of neighborhood flirt (Patricia Owens) who likes to bring out the beast in men, and then feed it peanuts.

Couple Three is a doomed duo: a used-car salesman (Tony Randall) in urgent need of a muffler on the mouth, and a girl (Sheree North) who looks as though five or six years of marriage have put 100,000 miles on her. The husband talks big, earns small, and drinks to forget the discrepancy. He dreams of the killing he will make some day, and never notices that he is murdering his wife by inches.

Couple Four personifies the steady and sane Joe and Jane (Pat Hingle and Barbara Rush)--he works hard in a hardware store; she is a well-shaped pillar of the church. But are they happy? No, the neighbors drive them crazy.

Two subjects fill the thoughts of the lost souls in this installment-plan inferno: steaks and sex. About the one they are mighty particular, but as for the other, it's the old story: familiarity breeds attempt. As a matter of fact, it soon becomes apparent that the movie is less concerned with contemporary social structure than with the eternal question of how girls are built. And the answer the film seems to suggest is that girls are very hard indeed to build, but quite easy to make.

The Helen Morgan Story (Warner). In days of old when girls were bold and torches were in fashion, some said the flame that burned the loveliest shade of blue was in the voice of Helen Morgan. She was the sad little girl with the big, scared eyes, who sat on a grand piano, twisted an abnormally large handkerchief and sang of bleeding hearts and faded flowers in a voice as dark and striking as the ring around a bathtub--after the gin has been siphoned out. It was the voice of the self-torturing '20s, filled with a sort of sobjectivity that one critic described as "the authentic note of heartbreak," and it went over big. She made a million dollars, and she spent it like a drunken singer. Soaked in alcohol, the Morgan torch burned bright for a few years, outdazzling all others when she played the original Julie in Show Boat. But the torch soon guttered out, and she died at 41 of an exhausted liver.

A sorry tale. Why bother to tell it? The producers apparently thought the public was ready to hear some of Helen's ballads belted once again, and they may be right. Some of the Jerome Kern and George Gershwin songs--Why Was I Born?, The Man I Love, Someone to Watch over Me, Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man--are wonderful of their kind. Some of them, moreover, are mighty well sung by Gogi Grant, whose gutsy voice is dubbed into the gutless performance of Actress Ann Blyth. As for the rest of the picture, it offers the moviegoer little more than the opportunity, wearisomely frequent in recent years, of listening to the interminable troubles of one more drunk. Indeed, if the alcoholic content of Hollywood movies gets any higher, the law might fairly require a producer to add to the usual screen credits a line declaring the picture's proof.

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