CINEMA
Jumping Jacks. (Plaza.)—My Wife's Best Friend. (Odeon.) THIS is slap-happy slapstick week, a week in which I, had I the choice, would pass by with some speed the cinemas' swinging doors, exchange the soft plush seats which cling so lovingly to my clothes and the scented disinfectant which clings so ardently to my nose for a hard park bench and the smell of wet leaves. I would give my eyes, ears and pocket a nice rest. Not many people would agree with me however, for one at any rate of the week's films stars two of the world's favourite comedians, Messrs. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
Mr. Lewis frankly scares me to death. In real life he may be a dear intelligent boy, but on the screen he plumbs the moronic to such depths that he genuinely alarms and embarrasses me. His mental deficiency, defined in gangling movements, squeaky whining voice, slack lips and vacant stare, is far too near the real thing to be funny, and I actively dislike being in his company more than I can ever say. l am therefore quite unfitted to judge Jumping Jacks dispassionately ; indeed the fact that so many thousands of my countrymen will roll down the aisles when they see it fills me with a dark gloomy passion foreign to my nature and bad for my complexion. Let me therefore confine myself before the flood of my discontent drowns me altogether to saying that Jumping Jacks is a farce centred round a parachute brigade in an Army camp, and that there is a lot of falling over, hiding from the sergeant and yelling. There is also one short but gleaming bit of nonsense with some sandwiches, the only edible portion of this tasteless, witless, utterly awful concoction. Now let them stampede in and see if I care I
*
Having calmed myself with copious draughts of sweetened tea, let me .now turn to My Wife's Best Friend, an unassuming comedy dealing with the marital difficulties of Mr. Macdonald Carey and Miss Anne Baxter. In the belief that they are going to die in a plane- smash Mr. Carey confesses he once had a brief love-affair with Miss Baxter's bosom pal, Miss Catherine McLeod, a confession which, on their landing safely, proves disastrous. Urged by her clergyman father to forgive her husband's one lapse from grace, Miss Baxter assumes the air of a saint—maddening. Implored by her husband to be just a plain ordinary wife she becomes excessively plain and dis- mally ordinary—exasperating. Her final bout of schoolgirl self-drama- tisation is to be a sort of femme fatale—nerve-wracking. That any woman with so mercurial an imagination exists out of films is doubtful, and that any man could support her for an instant if she did is impossible, and yet so dizzy does one become by the screen's curious magic that things seem, at the time, fairly plausible.
Miss Baxter has a whale of a time changing her character every ten minutes, and she gives a very creditable performance, so good indeed that she must needs arouse in every breast a feeling of wildest irrita- tion. Mr. Carey merely looks as though he were suffering from indigestion. Foolish but perfectly painless, this film is directed with a certain style by Mr. Richard Sale.
At the Cameo, Charing Cross Road, Britain is beginning on Monday its first Mr. Magoo week, no fewer than five of Mr. John Hutely's cartoons starring that shortsighted old silly of increasing
Previous page
