Cinema: The New Pictures: Jul. 10, 1939

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Man About Town (Paramount) was before the cameras when its star, Jack Benny, was convicted of cheating the U. S. Government of duty on trinkets for his wife. Paramount's chin-up reply to this embarrassing publicity was to hold a world premiere of the film in Waukegan, Ill., where Comedian Benny was born Benjamin Kubelsky 45 years ago. The film, another Jack Benny performance of his standard screen personality, a garrulous, cigar-chewing gull ready to be talked into anything once, is almost an exculpation in itself.

As lavish, tuneful, talent-packed as a good radio variety hour, Man About Town is just about as entertaining, just about as memorable. Pleasant surprise: that Rochester Van Jones (Eddie Anderson), Benny's radio valet, can tap as expertly as he can stooge.

Bachelor Mother (RKO Radio), despite a title calculated to arouse the curiosity of censor boards, is as wholesome and comic a twitting as bastardy has ever received. Although Polly Parrish (Ginger Rogers) is not the mother of the seven-months-old baby she brings to a foundling home, no one will believe her, because the infant howls when taken from her arms. Her predicament is complicated when her ex-boss's scapegrace son (David Niven), solicitous for the baby's welfare, gives her back her old job and a raise. Polly and her pals proceed in persistent misunderstandings and the baby keeps accumulating fathers until her no-nonsense boss (Charles Coburn) abruptly produces a solution by announcing that he does not know or care who the father may be, but is sure that he wants to be the grandfather.

Bachelor Mother was adapted from an eight-year-old German musical which songwriting Producer B. G. ("Buddy") De Sylva found tucked away in his sock. It was directed by RKO's current wonder boy, hawk-faced, 26-year-old Director Garson Kanin (A Man To Remember, The Great Man Votes). The picture is fresh, bright, human, hilarious, but its production was a series of crises:

>Actress Rogers demanded the right to supervise the script of Kanin's first A production.

>Director Kanin and Screenwriter Norman Krasna in collaboration produced an excellent script, but Krasna got so jittery in the process that he says he "began looking longingly at a river I know."

>Seven-months-old Elbert Coplen Jr. demoralized his associates by learning to talk on the set, caused one expensive retake when he uttered his first word. "Polly," another when he cut four teeth amidscenes.

>When the Hays Office at first thumbs-downed the picture's title, Producer D. Sylva and Director Kanin, an old Samuel Goldwyn man, offered the company a $200 prize for the best substitute. The contest was abandoned when Actor Frank Albertson solemnly submitted as his entry "Du Sylva Threads Among the Goldwyn."