Sugar, Spice and Salt
MAUREEN O'Hara is a beautiful young woman, and it is not the vulgar, loud beauty of some
of Honywood's dizzier blondes. It
is rather the beauty that you find in Connemara—or County Mayo, where the girls carry themselves like queens and with very good reason, for have they not royal blood in their veins? This week the beauteous Maureen is resplendent in Technicolour and a bee wildering succession of frocks. The title of the film is Do You Love Me? (Gaumout and Marble Arch Pavilion) and I'm afraid that it does nothing to advance the star's reputation as an
actress. Can she be unlucky in her directors over there? They have ruined more than one photogenic star by asking them only to pose in front of the camera with two expressions—one to show the teeth—the other to show a perfect mask.
This is an utterly idiotic story about how a dance band (Harry James and his boys) come to convert a School of Music to crooning and swing. So much for the sugar. The spice is provided also by a Ttchnicolour musical — Easy to Wed (Empire)—which, although it has its laboured moments, is on the whole a bright, well-dialogued affair with Esther Williams, the swimming wonder, doing a bit of acting, and Lucille Ball doing quite a lot. The Bobby-Sox dream of Perfection—Van Johnson—is the hero.
The salt comes from a potted vetsion of Othello (no home specified yet —and the idea is just in the experi mental stage). Henry Halstead and David McKane are responsible. They made it at a small studio in Marylebone. Laudable in intention, it aims at making Shakespeare acceptable to those unfortunate people whose only acquaintance with him has been to learn chunks out of his plays while at school, with little or no reference to the context. The B.B.C., I think, bad a better idea in a recent series, when they would take a certain character out of a play—Polonius or !ago or Prospero, and show how Shakespeare built tip the character by acting certain -' key " scenes.