LADY BE GOOD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 146, 10 April 1942, Page 14

LADY BE GOOD

(MGMJ

ALMOST began by saying that Lady Be Good narrowly missed being good entertainment. On reflection "narrowly" appears to be the wrong word.

It misses by at least two thousand of the film’s ten thousand odd feet. A pity, because there’s a lot of good stuff in the show. There’s Eleanor Powell’s tap dancing. There’s a lot of good fooling by Red Skelton. There’s some acrobatic crooning by a fetching young woman (Virginia O’Brien?) who appears to move only her collar-bones when she yodels. There’s a dog called Buttons who could claim an Oscar for the best canine performance of the year. There’s at least one quite attractive song hit-"Lady Be Good." And there are excellent performances by Ann Sothern and Robert Young. With all these advantages you might reasonably expect an A-grade film to emerge. But it doesn’t, and the fault, I feel suré, is the director’s. A little judicious pruning would have made all the difference, but far from doing any pruning, Mr. N. Z. McLeod seems to have gone out of his way to graft on little extra branches. There’s the Testimonial Dinner, for instance, as spurious as most testimonials. It serves merely to provide a setting for a full-length and tealisticaHy boring speech by a minor (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) character, and the singing by Ann Sothern of two verses and chorus of Jerome Kern’s "The Last Time I Saw Paris." She sings it quite well, I admit, and there’s as much play in her features as there is in the average test match. But if the director intended it to bring a tear to every eye he miscalculated. The spectacle of Ann Sothern (very close-up) is rather too eye-filling to leave toom for tears. And then there’s the plot. Now I know it’s an axiom in the motion picture business that a musical show doesn’t need much in the way of plot, but as this was not a very musical show I was prepared to allow it some sort of one. I was even prepared to permit Ann Sothern and Robert Young one martiage, one divorce, and one re-marriage. At the first re-marriage I started to collect my things. When we got as far as the second re-marriage I was quite resigned to sitting through another elaborate musical sequence, because in the stills outside the theatre I’d seen Eleanor Powell posing in some fetching black velveteen tights and she hadn't yet appeared in them. But I must have lost count of 500 or so of the ten thousand feet because it really was the end. Nevertheless, I left the theatre with the curious feeling that I’d walked out in the middle of the show and that probably Ann Sothern and Robert Young would go right on getting married, divorced, and re-married till the end of time in spite of the fact that the theatre was empty and there wasn’t even a charwoman to watch them.