EASY TO WED

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 381, 11 October 1946, Page 33

EASY TO WED

(M-G-M)

OU may recall an excellent | comedy called Libelled Lady which was made in 1936, which starred Jean Harlow, Myrna Loy, William Powell,

and Spencer Tracy, and in which Powell made his heroic attempt to pronounce "Lake Taupo." Well, this is what is left of that comedy, after they have got through trying to revive it with injections of technicolour and hot music, not to mention ‘the much-heralded charms of Mr. Van Johnson and Miss Esther Williams. In point of fact, the only persons who have any success in bringing the plot to life are Keenan Wynn and Lucille Ball, and even for them it is a struggle. Of course, if you share the adoration of the bobby-sox brigade in the U.S.A. for Van Johnson, Easy to Wed has certain obvious advantages, since his innocent, cherubic countenance is on the screen, much of the time in yearning close-up, for a good part of the film’s two hours. Yet even his most enraptured admirers may question, the wisdom of casting this baby-faced young man, whose mannerisms suggest that he is not long out of the cradle, in the role of a sophisticated professional heartbreaker whose assignment on this occasion is to compromise Esther Williams in order to make her millionaire father (Cecil Kellaway) drop a_ libel suit against a newspaper. To offset their apparent lack of discernment in this direction, the producers allow Miss Williams to be glimpsed once or twice in a bathing suit, and even to kiss Mr. Johnson under water. But this, plus one excellent musical sequence and the few laughs contributed by Miss Ball and Mr. Wynn yield, I feel, a rather inadequate return in entertainment,