Word: celluloidal
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Sabrina (Paramount). When Hollywood's abracadabblers find a new formula for turning celluloid into gold, they overwork it every time. For Sabrina, based on Samuel Taylor's Broadway hit, Paramount's magicians used the same elements that mixed so well in Roman Holiday: Actress Audrey Hepburn, Director Billy Wilder, a switch on the old Cinderella story. Gold, in a word, is guaranteed at the boxoffice, and this is never less than glittering entertainment, but somehow a certain measure of lead has found its way into the formula...
Miss Holliday and her two marquee running mates attempt to make up for what the plot lacks in coherence and pace. Playing a playboy with a turn for ear kissing, Peter Lawford is his usual suave self. Jack Lemmon breaks into celluloid as Gladys' camera happy boyfriend. The latter, star of the 1946 Pudding show, seems to have picked up a new habit of dress since leaving Harvard, but his acting ability is only hampered by some of the script's insipidly sentimental lines...
Died. William Harrison (Will) Hays, 74, pioneer guardian of Hollywood's celluloid morals (as head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America), onetime G.O.P. National Committee chairman (1918-21) and Harding's first Postmaster General (1921-22); of a heart ailment; in his home town, Sullivan, Ind. Resigning as Postmaster General, he accepted Hollywood's offer to let him wipe clean the sin-filled screen (at $100,000 a year), forestalled a widespread public demand for state censorship. No czar, wily Will Hays became U.S. filmdom's No. 1 booster (and whipping boy), helped...
...Home (Universal) is a musical with its brains in its feet. The feet, young Donald O'Connor's, are clever enough to weave their way through any reasonably foolish script. But in this picture, Dancer O'Connor is tangled in at least a half-mile of celluloid that should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The love interest: Janet Leigh, in a sweater. The whole thing ends with a sort of death rattle: a concert of "symphonic Dixieland" that seems better calculated to finish jazz than to revive...
Banned aboard ship by U.S. Navy, banned on Sundays by the City of Boston, The Moon Is Blue is a celluloid peek into present day American sexual mores. But only the most stodgy will find its lampooning of erotic fashions and follies other than civilized and urbane...