CINEMA
"On the Town." (Empire.)—" Young Man of Music." (Odeon.) —"Appointment with Danger." (Plaza.) On The Town is a musical which makes no. pretensions to be anything else. It has no story, unless you can call a day in the lives of three sailors seeing New York a story, and there cannot be more than ten minutes in all in which the human voice is heard speaking. It opens with one of the gayest, most exhilarating numbers I have ever heard in my life, by Mr. Leonard Bernstein. At the Press show this had such an effect on the critics that they clapped, and then sat back feeling immensely foolish ; for there is nothing in the world more silly than applauding celluloid. Having scaled the heights of enjoyment, one must needs descend into the valleys, but these are not deep or dark, and are full of singing and dancing and nigh to bursting their slopes with vigour. Here you have then Messrs. Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly and Jules Munshin and the Misses Vera-Ellen, Ann Miller and Betty Garrett radiating atomic energy, filling the eye and ear with dances and songs superbly executed and guaranteed to make the heart leap, staglike, in the breast, from sheer joie de vivre.
Also devoted to music, but this time to the mournful cries of the trumpet, is Young Man of Music. Mr. Kirk Douglas plays the part of the youth whose only desire in life is to hit a higher note than anyone else. and who finds no happiness save in blowing apoplectically down his instrument. Neither Miss Doris Day nor Miss Lauren Bacall can seduce him from his love, and when this brassy mistress of his fails him—trumpeters, it seems, blow them- selves out quite soon—he sinks lower than a double bass ; into the gutter, in fact. Mr. Douglas is extremely good as this strange misfit in society, and makes the character convincing and touching. As he steals away to play to himself in lonely corners, one senses the unhappi- ness of the misunderstood man. He plays, of course, divinely, for at the invisible end of the trumpet is Mr. Harry James, the god of hepcats. There is also Mr. Hoagy Carmichael at the piano. So for jive fans this film provides a feast of the sounds they like best. Others of a more classical mind may wonder if the soul of this trumpeter is worth saving. Appointment with Danger is a routine thriller with Mr. Alan Ladd as the cop who goes to work for the crooks he is striving to catch. The only novelty in this not very original film is the intro- duction of Miss Phyllis Calvert to the role of a nun. It is curious, but, although I have barely exchanged a dozen words with nuns, I know Miss Calvert's voice to be completely un-nunlike. She looks pure and simple, but the series of unworldly remarks she is called upon to make have a timbre of sophistication which prevent one from believing in her for a moment. Miss Jan Stirling as a gangster's be-bop-loving moll is delightfully nitwitted, and has some of the few good lines to speak, and Mr. Henry Morgan gives a brief but intelligent sketch of a sentimental murderer. On the whole, this picture has nothing new to offer, and down to the same old fight in the same old factory runs pretty true to pattern.
VIRGINIA GRAHAM.
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