CONTEMPORARY ARTS
CINEMA
" A Life of her Own." (Odeon, Marble Arch.)--" Let's Dance." (Carlton.) In A Life of'Her Own Miss Lana Turner is told by Mr. Louis Caihern that she cannot find happiness through wrecking the happiness of others—news which comes as a nasty surprise to her. Determined, however, to hold on to her lover, played with a new-found gauntness by Mr. Ray Milland, this beautiful successful cover girl flaunts off to lay the facts of the case before his wife. But stay, what is this ? She is a cripple 1 She is Miss Margaret Phillips, chair-ridden and bursting with womanly intuitions, so sensitive to a stranger's thought-rays she can deliver herself of a lengthy series of profound platitudes while Miss Turner sits blinking at her like an owl—unable to say who she is or why she has come or, indeed, anything. " I can see you are desper- ately unhappy," says Miss Phillips. Or at any rate desperately dumb. This encounter between the two sides of the eternal triangle is one of the strangest I have ever witnessed. It is altogether a strange film, for though the script is bad and the acting below average—Miss Ann Dvorak redeems it a bit with her portrayal of grief-stricken drunkenness
— it has been directed by Mr. George Cukor with much intelligence. One cannot quite dismiss it as poppycock, but is compelled to bath in the bathos for the sake of the bath's design.
It seems Mr. Fred Astaire alternates between feeling too old to dance
— in his last picture he lay on a sofa composing lyrics—or too old to be romantic. In Let's Dance, one of those idiot stories peppered with superb dance sequences, he has, as a partner, the violent, arm-flaying Miss Betty Hutton, as agile a hoofer as ever left a dervish's camp but not a creature conducive to sentimentality. And I think, though the dancing here is brilliant, one sadly misses the elegance of the floating chiffon and the swinging tail-coat, the beauty of that genre of extrava- gant ballroom dancing which used so to enchant. Miss Hutton is a nice personality, and when static she is a sensible, jolly down-to-earth character ; but when she goes into action she is like a supercharged roadster tearing along with the horn blowing, and one cannot help remembering with nostalgia the quiet snattoth Rolls Royce that was Miss Ginger Rogers. Mr. Astaire need not feel he is now undeserving of glamorous love. Many people, myself included, love him with relent-
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